Don’t listen to your favorite high school teacher. Even though she wears power suits and smells of musk oil and cigarettes, even though she is prone to graceful, literary gesticulations, she isn’t always right.

“Women who keep their legs closed have all the power,” she’ll say one day in class, drawing a lesson from some novel you are studying.

You’ll have just lost your virginity, so of course you’ll think she is talking specifically about you. You’ll feel ashamed, powerless — not just because you did it to the Counting Crows—but because you take everything she says as fact. And you’ll think you’d have played the entire thing wrong; that if you really wanted respect, you wouldn’t have given him what you both(!) wanted. Maybe you should have withheld your virtue for another respectable two years, until prom or some kind of big important life event. Until he said “I love you” or “I want to be with you forever,” regardless of the truth. Until he had really proven himself worthy of the only thing you had to hold over his head.

At 21, you’ll withhold sex from a guy for weeks, and guess what? He will never love you back. At 24, you’ll sleep with a man on the first date, and holy shit, he will move across the country for you! Love is a complex cocktail of elusive things like “timing” and “luck” and “your parents messing you up in compatible ways.” People will accept or reject you for reasons that have nothing to do with you at all. I know that sounds depressing, but it can also be liberating.

When you were in elementary school, you discovered that your brother and his friends were charging the neighborhood kids $5 a pop for a screening of the Spice Channel, which they had just discovered on TV. Remember how you begged them to let you watch, even though you were a girl? Sex seemed so scary then, but it’ll only get more frightening. You’ll soon discover that people — yourself included — use intimacy as a vehicle for getting needs met, and most of the time what they “need” has little to do with pure physical desire. It’s the stuff of feelings, one of the most powerful factors in decision-making, good and bad. We all need on an animalistic level to feel Desired and Good and Loved and Powerful. Turns out that sex is the tequila shot equivalent of accessing feelings of self-worth. Be careful.

Your sophomore year, the soccer team will decide to dump all of their girlfriends on the same day — this includes you. Your devastating takeaway: boys just crave the excitement of new flesh. It seems as though men make all the decisions, and they do so based solely on getting their dick wet. In reality, these guys are just as broken and insecure as you, some even more so. When they don’t text you back, don’t overanalyze into a panic attack — it has nothing to do with how good or bad you are at dick-sucking, or that thing you said when you were drunk, or the cellulite on your ass. Yes, you are uniquely repulsive, but they are, too, so they probably won’t notice.

At times, sex will feel more compelling with people you shouldn’t sleep with. You will be intrigued by a charming co-worker, your friend’s ex-boyfriend, a guy who maybe has a girlfriend? Trysts are fun for five minutes until they are not. Eventually, they will reveal themselves as atomic lust bombs that cost you real relationships with people that matter. Have your fun, but then learn your lesson and stop being such an animal.

Another thing: extremely passionate men aren’t necessarily compassionate. Most of them are quite the opposite. Be cautious around those who make your face melt. They are dark, depraved individuals who can’t be trusted with anything.

Soon, you will meet boys who like to talk a lot of shit about how much they love eating pussy. They think they deserve some kind of an award for wanting to pleasure you! Don’t let it confuse you — this behavior is actually hilarious. You should laugh about it. A lot. Ideally, at them, while you take them up on their offer.

One winter a man you love will tell you that you’ll never be happy with anyone. Stop gutturally sobbing in public like you’ve just lost your future husband. One day you will realize that you just confused love and sex, something you’ll do an embarrassing number of times. It’s okay.

This will happen because you are frequently told “sex is better with people you love.” That can be true, but it is by no means a rule. You will have long-term, serious relationships, but you will also have great, transformative experiences with people you don’t love and who don’t love you. Some you will really like, some you won’t — most will be somewhere in between. Remember that love isn’t really about strength of connection, or chemistry; it’s about dedication and hard work.

The following fall, you’ll meet someone and he won’t be the kind of person you wanted when you were 15; he’ll be younger and wilder and stranger. The relationship will be casual, probably only lasting past the first snowfall. Or maybe until it’s warm again. Or possibly even forever. Who knows.

For a long time, you will think that intense attraction and mutual respect are exclusive to monogamy. You will feel guilty and weird when your life experiences don’t support that theory. You will wonder if maybe you are just incapable of partnership. Even into your late twenties, you won’t have all of this figured out. You won’t be on your way to marriage, not even close. And maybe you never will be.

But he will always sense your racing thoughts, and one night, he will tell you something you’ve only recently discovered on your own: “You are okay just the way you are.” You don’t need a wedding at a fucking farm in upstate New York to believe that (although that would help). You can still find tenderness outside monogamy; you can still find meaning outside of everything you thought you wanted.

✌,
Alana