A few years ago I corresponded with my first real boyfriend. I was married, he was married, we caught up a bit with emails and let it sputter out. Recently we friended each other on Facebook and it turns out I’m no longer married and he’s going through his divorce. Which doesn’t really mean anything in the long run…

But it has brought back some memories. Not that I ever forgot about him. He lived on the corner where I caught the bus to school, and many was the time I never made it into school. We were together for 18 months and most of that time was spent in bed. Great experimenter, ready to try anything. You name it and we probably did it once or twice. I was pretty fast and loose before we got together but this was really good.

But my parents divorced, Mom dumped me with strangers for the summer and I wasn’t allowed to use the phone, and then Mom and I had moved into town, she hated him, life moved on and I broke it off. There was some fairly serious psycho shit from him including a bit of stalkerish stuff and his motorcycle through our picture window and then he finally wandered off.

Hey, we were young. I was 15-16 and he wasn’t much older.

But I remember thinking about my choices at that time. I wanted out of my small town, out of Michigan altogether. Everywhere I looked seemed like a trap of rednecks, beer bellies, babies, and being a factory rat. EVERYONE worked at a factory. Mom worked at Ford putting windshields into Granadas, Dad hauled cars out of GM, all my friends’ parents worked at some auto-related plant or another. I knew I didn’t want that.

I took computer classes in school back when computers took up entire rooms. We never mentioned college in our family but the military was talked about a lot. Most of my older cousins were either Navy or Air Force. And I knew R, who had a disabled father and no mother around, would be trapped in that town for a long time. That’s ultimately why I broke up with him. He wasn’t gonna get me out.

There was another fella between R and Buck. K was also older (I never hooked up with a guy my own age) but he fucking painted designs on cars for a living. Another variation on the auto-worker mentality. When he started talking about buying a house there I was done with him. He ended up marrying a girl from my graduating class and now owns a wheel store in Tucson. Anyway, I wanted OUT.

Turns out Buck wasn’t a lot of help in that department either. I knew he’d lived in AZ for a couple of years and had only recently come back to his family. I thought it meant he would be more apt to move us away. Nope. He settled into factory life so I joined the Air Force right after my graduation. I broke it off with him after basic training when he didn’t want to leave Michigan. Turns out a few months later he had a rethinking and moved in with me in Virginia and the rest is history.

But the moral of the story is I got MYSELF out. Not that there was anything particularly wrong with any of these guys, but that I had an agenda. I don’t think I was that coldly determined at the time, but I see it clearly now. Of the three R was probably the best match for me, but I shed the poor guy and never gave him the chance. I settled in with Buck because he chose to follow me when I left. I married him because I wanted kids and that’s what you were supposed to do. K had no hard feelings about our breakup, even got together with his buddies to pay for our wedding night hotel. But because of the aftermath of the breakup with R, I don’t think I could have given him the chance until… now.

We’re all grown up now. Let’s see what happens.