Growth Alone
Being 35 years old and still single without children, I sat in an empty house considering how much I was able to learn and grow and continue to discover year by year. How much of a luxury it had been to gain an understanding of life before settling down to be set in the ways that I’d been taught my whole life, never having learned anything on my own.
The particular house I was occupying at the moment belonged to my friend Morgan. It was a charming, three bedroom place in the boonies of SE OK. Oklahoma is a place where the divorce rate hovers around 50%. Seems a high figure when considering Oklahoma’s occupants are overwhelmingly religious, protestants not keen on separation, as the Bible is against said things.
Nevertheless, when considering the opportunity to grow and mature, marrying at age 18 can hinder the process. The south has always carried these traditions of young marriage. Yesteryear it was due to the average life span being much shorter. It was imperative to settle down at 13 to have all your children, that way you could watch them grow into puberty, meet your grandkids and die at 33 years old.
Nowadays, it seems, for many, to be due to convenience of knowing their God hates humping between people who aren’t married, and fulfilling that Christly duty, so that two teenagers can fornicate to their heart’s content. I know growing up in Baptist churches, I was adamant I’d wait until marriage to make sex. I even took a celibacy vow at the same Baptist Church where I’d been guilted into getting saved a couple years prior, as the youngest participant in our youth group church camp, “well all but two of us have been saved here this week…” Thanks for the call out, Jared!
By the time I was 19, I was dating a spicy little lady, and my young hormones couldn’t control it anymore. I’d actually gotten blue balls (it’s an actual thing) after hours of fooling around after we’d snuck in the dollar theater one night. I worked back in our hometown, 60 miles from where she lived with her brothers, had already stayed out too late, and needed to be up in 5 hours. My testicles felt as if they were turning, which was the most excruciating pain I’d ever felt in my life to that moment, so I did what any rational teenager would do, and jerked off while I was driving home.
A short month later, I lost my virginity in my twin-sized sleigh bed, and then on the floor for a bit. For the next year, we sexed every time we saw each other. In cars, friend’s bathrooms, a golf cart. You name it, we were fucking on it!
After that, I moved onto a new relationship. A devout Church of Christ girl, whom I was infatuated with. After months of doing my best not to take her virginity, we wound up on the floor in the hallway of my house while we were skipping US government class. She never had the fervor for it like I did, and I had an insatiable libido that rarely considered anything beyond sweet, sweet sexing.
I began attending her church often, and was a fan of the college youth minister and the round-table discussions that took place every Wednesday night of my life for several years. His name was Toby, and unlike Jared, he was a wonderful minister who was honest with us about things we didn’t understand. I truly loved those nights, and looked forward to them with great zeal.
Over the years, my friends Brendan, Tyler, and I, inquisitive as we were, asked question after question. Many of which, Toby, nor the other scholars in the room had answers for. Rather than being like many other’s and giving some dismissive answer such as, “you have to have faith.” our questions were often met with, “I don’t know the answer to that.” It’s not that he wasn’t well-versed in Biblical knowledge, it’s that we were diving into a lot that simply can’t be answered. I watched the three of us go from devout, to lukewarm, to non-believers in the course of college.
This was my first true introduction to critical thinking. My girlfriend and I broke up. I began traveling to far off places like New York and California, as the world opened up to me. I wouldn’t have another serious girlfriend for a couple of years, and the time spent alone gave me permission to question more things on my own, rather than being tied into a collective thought process.
I’d imagine many people who were religious and married at a young age had similar questions to the ones we were asking. However, as that had become part of their marriage identity, having faith became the answer, and they were forced to double down on their beliefs, despite their own harrowing uncertainty. As time goes on, some have become religious fanatics, so hell-bent on their own faith that they become overbearing trying to convince others, while they’re still having to convince themselves.
This sort of narrative may not only be commonplace in religion, but also in sexuality. How often have we witnessed the most adamant anti-gay people wind up actually being gay? Those who are truly certain of something don’t find it necessary to showcase their beliefs in hopes of convincing people. But when an ideology becomes part of your identity, it becomes maddeningly difficult to break free from the persona you’ve created. Especially when you need that thing to be true, because how else can you exist if it’s not?
Having had an abundance of alone time has allowed me the opportunity to consider my own growth, rather than having to be half of an identity, which makes it exponentially harder to change who you are. No one truly knows who they are at 20, and we all need the space to grow into who we need to become before deciding the person we’ll attempt to spend the rest of our lives with. If you disagree, I’ve got a high divorce rate chart that says otherwise.
