Then + Now
In our last American Presidency lecture, Wendy Schiller (one of my favorite professors at Brown/people in the entire world) took our final moments together as a class to talk about life and love. One of her main theses was, “If someone is mean to you, they don’t love you.” And with that one thought, I knew what I would write my Senior Send-Off about. Throughout my tenure at Blog, I have tried to back up my articles with real anecdotes from my own life. With this one, my last, I am going to attempt to sum up everything about love and sex that I have learned in the last few years. Most importantly, I want to make clear that loving and respecting yourself is the key to finding your own internal happiness, and as a result, finding the love you deserve.
When I entered college (what feels like eons ago), 15 pounds lighter than I had been in high school and with a blank slate, I was determined to set myself up for romantic success. I flirted hard, and DFMO’d harder. I definitely wanted a significant other, but I had to admit: the adventure along the way was pretty fun. I became comfortable with other people seeing me naked. I lost my virginity. I perfected my blow job technique. I took everything that happened in stride, whether it was someone I had hooked up with blowing me off, or doing the same to someone interested in me. I was exploring entirely new territory and was happy to take the battle scars along the way.
Sophomore year, things started to shift. It was harder to just ignore that hurt feeling when someone treated me with less respect than I knew I deserved. That lack of respect was far-reaching: from one person who consistently ignored my texts until it was convenient for him, to one guy I had been dating for two months telling me he actually already had a girlfriend who didn’t go to school with us. “You’re so fun and great,” they would all tell me, “but I don’t want anything serious right now.” I put up with it because I wanted that affirmation that I had craved for so long. Maybe they would come around eventually, I rationalized.