If the first experience for me—with my first girlfriend—was pretty great, this one was awful. It was the worst-case scenario you can imagine for a woman having sex for the first time—tons of crying. I’m having an awful time. I kept asking in the middle of sex, “Do you want me to stop? Do you want me to stop? This is not working.” And through the tears, she would say, “No, keep going.” It was a horrible experience. The sex got better as the relationship went on, but the first time was terrible. After my seasonal job ended, she moved to Seattle, and I moved to Denver to be in AmeriCorps. The relationship lasted maybe two months after we moved apart. We were in no shape to have a long-distance relationship.
It always seems that I find hookups if I’m looking for a relationship. If I’m looking for hookups, I find a relationship. That’s been a strong theme throughout my adult life. The year I was in AmeriCorps, what I wanted—at least, what I thought I wanted—was to find “The One” to find the next long-term relationship. But I was in a new state every two months for the job, and that constant moving around made it pretty much impossible (not that I saw it at the time). You’ll never have a long-term relationship when you must be gone in a month and a half.
One hookup happened the day before the girl I saw in Alaska, and I broke up. I did it kind of out of spite because I was positive that she would break up with me. I don’t think she’d called me in a week or something like that. I was angry and assumed a breakup was coming, so I hooked up with somebody. I ended up being right, and the next day, the girl from Alaska called me and, without knowing any of it, broke up with me. Not one of my finest moments.
There was a bar across the street from the campus where we lived, where all the AmeriCorps people would go because they wouldn’t card if you were 19 or 20. So we could all be together, hang out, drink, and have fun. There were a number of hookups that started there and then led to sex back in the dorm rooms. On the last day of the job, I think everybody was kind of sad that this experience was over for us, and everybody was saying goodbye and kind of looking for physical comfort, so I know a lot of people hooked up with other people at that point; I ended up doing the same thing.
The AmeriCorps program I was part of was about 500 people, and we were broken into teams of about a dozen; I never did anything with the people who were directly on my team, but when we were back at home base in Denver, everyone was there together, and we’d all go to that bar. The person I hooked up with on the very last day, well, she was known amongst the group. She played the ukulele and performed at a talent show and a couple of other times. Everybody knew her as the ukulele girl. It’s one of those things where I don’t even know how it happened because I’d never spoken to her, but I remember walking up to her in the bar, saying goodbye, kissing her, and then walking away. And then, at the end of the night, when the bar was closing, she was walking around looking for me. I couldn’t tell you why I acted that way besides alcohol and emotions, but it ended up in sex.
