3rd Place Essay, Advocates for Youth 5th Annual Essay-Writing Contest

Here's my piece, as promised.

A Letter About the Day After

Dear Lonely Teenager,

    You’ve laid eyes on that special someone, that other half of your soul, while eating in the cafeteria, or riding on the MRT. You muster up the courage to take the first step. You talk, you hang out, and slowly but surely, to the tune of soft montage music, you’re falling in love. But, your love is forbidden. Maybe your parents are strict, conservative, church-going dinosaurs who frown on you having “relations”. Maybe the two of you are of the same sex. Maybe you’re ugly, fat and lower middle-class while she’s pretty, sexy and rich. No matter, no taboo is going to hold back your love! Love conquers all! You defy the world, tell her that you love her, and for some inexplicable, scripted, movie-logic sort of reason, she says yes. Then, the two of you tumble into bed. Your personal journey of sexual self-discovery is complete. All in two hours.

    Here is where those fickle story-tellers yell “cut!” They tell you that “love” is the end of all things, and that “love” has no purer ecstatic manifestation than sex.  Here’s what they don’t tell you. Let’s assume that it all turned out like the movies. Your personal journey of sexual self-discovery ends after about three minutes of writhing around in the dark. (An hour longer if you’re lesbian.) Now comes the real world. You used no prophylactic last night, since you couldn’t really think of putting that blasted rubber on, what with all the heady romance of the moment. After all, there’s nothing romantic about treating sex like a surgical procedure or a crime scene investigation. Does she have an STD? (Much greater chance if “she” is a “he” and so are you.) She can’t! Love conquers all, right? Then, the pain and the itching start. If you’re a guy and your girl was as pure as driven snow, you’re still not out of the woods. Four months later, you get a call. Congratulations, you’re a dad! Nine months after the fact, you’re forced to become a man in a boy’s body. If you chose to have her abort, then you won’t become a man at all, you pussy.

    But, what if you’re both girls? No STD’s, no pregnancy, no problems, right? Life’s still a fairytale. That is, until you finally realize why instances of domestic violence occur in higher rates among lesbians (and gays) than in the general population. You also discover that you’re liberal parents cry at night because you’re never going to give them grandkids. Way to make you and everybody around you happy, champ. After surviving all that, you get your little moral victory, until you discover your “life partner” in bed with your best girlfriend. It’s a small community. 

    Okay, so you might think that these are just the horror stories. Fine, let’s pretend that everything turned out alright. The two of you have a disease-free relationship. What now? The annoying habits movies leave out pile up, and sex becomes the only thing keeping you together. That’s a lot of pressure on a three-minute exercise (longer for lesbians).    You try new things, but for how long? Once even auto-erotic asphyxiation gets old, what now? You break up.

    The movies lie. It’s no fun watching your dreams crushed and your heart torn out. After your fairy-tale romance, you’ll feel like a used up condom, even if you did use condoms. You’ll be kicking yourself so hard for giving everything to that bitch (they’re all bitches after a break-up), and you didn’t even get a stupid T-shirt for it. What have you learned then?

    Love is not sex. Love is not even an emotional high. Love is an act of the will. Just ask the old man caring for his Alzheimer’s wife. True love is when you are able to force yourself to love the person you wake up next to, even if she now looks like your Mom and the magic’s all gone. You can’t do that while as a care-free teenager, or as a brash career achiever still nursing his fragile ego. You have to grow up. Sex is part of that process. If you take the time to build a relationship before bumping uglies, you’ll find that it is much more satisfying because there is no pressure on the act at all. What will keep you together is not the sex, but each other. You’ll find that this is doubly-enhanced when the protection you put on is not some rubber CSI dick glove, but a wedding ring, for the ring protects by binding the two of you together and not by shielding you from each other with a thin rubber layer. The sex may eventually disappear, but love never gets old.

                                                                                                          Sincerely,
                                                                                                          Jaded Yuppie
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Now that I read it again, I realize that it does look like its been put together in just an hour. The ideas are not very organized. I think it only won based on style, and the need for a token voice for abstinence. The other two who came above me seemed to have essays that delved into the topic more closely. The winning one even had the theme in its title...

Anyway, I'm just glad it won something.