He Was The Perfect Boyfriend (But Wouldn't Touch Me)
At fifteen, I thought I had met my dream man. Just one minor hiccup.
Since I got a big influx in new subscribers after I released the findings of my body type survey, I may as well formally introduce myself to you all. Hello, I am CHH, who many people are calling the “most annoying and yet most illustrious and brilliant quirk chungus millennial of our era.” I do a variety of studies on social dynamics (mostly sex and relationships) but I also cover sex and relationships topics in general, while occasionally touching parenting, friendship, fashion, and even random shit like the sex lives of incel gorillas or the Reddit sub that fell victim to drama about the prettiest vagina (yes, really.) And sometimes—including today—I’ll write a true personal essay. But either way, I publish 4-5 times a week, so if you don’t like a daily article, rest assured something else will be your taste.
So, again, the following story is 100% true, and I hope you like it.
As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I was an early bloomer. Not in the boob way (I’m still waiting for those to arrive at thirty-six, quite frankly) but I was interested in boys and dating as soon as I was capable of walking. I’m not exaggerating—there is a photo of me aggressively trying to kiss a family friend’s son two years my senior when I’m pretty sure I was still in diapers.
Anyway, by the time I was in high school, I had “dated” quite a bit. There was my fourth grade ex-boyfriend who dumped me on our class bird watching trip (I actually think he simply forgot we were dating at all given that our “relationship” involved no contact with each other including talking, but I wrote approximately seventeen power ballads inspired by his betrayal anyway.) I had an on-again-off-again boyfriend in the sixth and seventh grade, and one of our dates involved him jumping on his parents’ ottoman while reciting McDonald’s commercials at me. By the time I was in eighth grade, I had a “real” boyfriend for about seven months. Yes, he was a weird kid who was kind of obsessed with my mom, but we did real boyfriend-girlfriend things. We went on dates, made out, and even engaged in some reciprocal heavy petting, so now I can say I’ve given a handjob at the top of a lighthouse (and I apologize to the nice older couple who thought they were about to get some beautiful sights of the Cape May shoreline.)
Despite all of this early experience, by the time I was in tenth grade, I was still a virgin. Obviously, being a virgin at fifteen is expected and it shouldn’t have bothered me at all, but I was self-conscious about it because I went to an extremely horny boarding school where everyone was pulling down their dress-code-approved corduroys and fucking all the time in various closets, crawl spaces and dusty crevices. Not just the popular kids, either. We had geeks doing “dry oral” (aka, licking each other over the underpants) on the lacrosse field, and for some reason, I never received my invitation!
I didn’t even want to have sex, at least not as far as any kind of literal, physical desire went. I would look at photos of attractive boys and wonder why I felt the same way I’d feel looking at photos of watering cans—and it’s not like I felt any more aroused by girls. My bunkmate at theater camp used to lasciviously lick photographs of Russell Crowe she had taped to the wall by her bed, and I simply could not relate. I experienced sexuality in a way that didn’t really make sense to me at the time. I was constantly obsessed over someone named Zach or Tyler, on a quest for a boyfriend, and yet not aroused by boys in any literal way. What really excited me was the prospect of being desired at all, not doing the desiring. Was I narcissist-sexual? Objectification-sexual? I didn’t want to think about it.
That said, I did experience a lot of romantic attraction. I had crushes. I knew what made a boy good-looking, charismatic, or interesting. And despite my weirdness about sexual arousal and attraction, I wanted a boyfriend, and most importantly, I wanted a boyfriend who was absolutely, totally, obsessed with me.
Enter my friend Trevor—a cute, shaggy-haired artist of seventeen who was both handsome and completely unaware of it, friendly and chatty without being annoying, socially capable without being “popular” and therefore not out of my league. Had I finally stumbled upon the ideal boyfriend?
