Vivid Memories #10
It was the year 2000, and I was in the 10th grade, on a class retreat along with everyone else in my 10th grade class. I went to a private, Catholic high school, and we had a fair amount of retreats. If you've never been on one, it's basically a field trip to a secluded location where you have carefully supervised (read: boring) fun, eat free food, and listen to a few religious-themed talks that are supposed to help you grow as a person and as a Catholic. I can't remember the exact theme of this particular retreat, but it had something to do with relationships. I guess as 10th graders, we were getting to be around that age.
The activity we were doing involved one of the priests who was leading the retreat asking some questions, and us writing our answers down on index cards. The cards were then collected and read, so he could get a grip on how we felt about the issues in question. One of the questions we had to answer was something like, "is it OK to have sex before marriage?"
I remember the answer I wrote down pretty well. I wrote down something along the lines of "No. It is wrong to have sex unless it is for conceiving a child."
I would love to say that I wrote that answer down ironically. The truth is that I was 15 years old and didn't really know or care about anything besides video games. I didn't have much of an interest in girls or any kind of opinion about sex yet because I was too busy thinking about Final Fantasy VIII and Marvel vs. Capcom, so I treated it like a test and did what any other test-taking tactician would do in that situation: wrote down what I thought they wanted hear. I was trying to get the question right. That answer didn't seem unreasonable, given that everyone in that school was pretty damn Catholic.
After the priests had time to review the answers, they picked out a few notable ones to discuss. I think my honest expectation was to hear him read out cards with really misinformed answers like "yes it's OK as long as you use protection" and then correct all the heathens with threats of hellfire. I was pretty surprised when he started reading my card, and the speech he gave afterward went something like:
"This is not what we're trying to teach you! Sex is a beautiful thing, an expression of love between two people who are in love. It's OK to have sex before marriage as long as you're in a committed relationship."
All I could think was, "Huh. Didn't see that coming." I'm positive that some of the other 10th graders were laughing.
One of the kids in my class was my friend Ryan. I didn't really "come out of my shell," so to speak, until the 11th grade, so there weren't many people in that school that I would have called "friend" yet, but Ryan was definitely one of them. He was really smart, very vocal, a skilled debater, and very into politics. He was also squeaky clean and well-liked by most of the faculty. Basically, he was exactly the kind of person who you would expect to write down the answer that I did.
After the discussion, I remember looking around the sea of 10th graders sitting Indian style and seeing Ryan, vehemently defending himself against several other kids who were convinced that he wrote that super nerdy answer to the sex question. Nobody suspected it was me, because you would have to pay some attention to me to suspect me of something. I didn't mean to, but I inadvertently put him in a pretty tough spot.
Sorry Ryan.
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