Page Two of Thank You Ian
Three years of adolescent hormones and peer pressure, added to the fact that he went to one of the largest and most prestigious public high schools in the city while I was sheltered in one of the smallest private ones, only adds to the wonder of our romance as I think back. By then we’d been dating weekly, except for a time when I'd been very sick — for three years!
The war had started during our first year of dating. Ian enlisted as soon as he got out of school in the submarine service, along with his best friend. They would come home on liberty after boot camp bringing more sailors with them. My school mates and I were in a veritable whirlwind of uniforms and the glamour that goes with them.
Once the liquor laws had been changed to allow anyone old enough to be in uniform to drink in a bar, everything about our social lives shifted into high gear. Ian knew my father's views on alcohol: both our parents enjoyed wine and a cocktail before dinner. My father made sure I was not in awe of drink by letting me taste whatever I wanted. He forbade me to order anything in a bar except Scotch (to avoid bad liquor), and it never occurred to me to have more than one drink.
Ian saw to it that no matter what the rest of our group might be doing, no one could ever make fun of me or force me to change my one-drink habit. One look at the expression on his face when he made this clear insured that there would be no problems. It became an accepted fact in our group, even though occasionally we would leave one of my classmates miserably vomiting into the gutter, or being supported through the door by her date.
We young women were of a class that we would never have admitted to at the time, but that I think still exists today: genteel, upper middle class, educated, and mostly politically liberal. Those young men we dated in wartime were mostly blue collar, well brought up, socially unsophisticated, but sexually experienced and feeling the recklessness engendered by their situations.
I doubt if most of us understood just how dangerous our positions could have been, or how lucky we were in those friends of Ian’s, whom he led effortlessly to be chivalrous.
Only one of us that I know of took advantage of the new freedom of the times.
Ian kissed me often and seriously after that first one. I was thrilled every time. I had fantasies of what it would be like to be his wife. I knew the 'facts of life' in a strictly text-book sense, and I longed to try sleeping with him. Maybe it was a childhood spent reading The Morte d'Arthur and teen years immersed in Tolstoy and Dickens, familiarity with Bible stories and conventional churchly morality, as well as a father who might have been living in the previous century when it came to his attitude about his daughter. Whatever it was, I was determined to be a virgin bride.
In that atmosphere of carpe diem and war time, we were bound to have some kind of discussion about such things. I remember Ian’s insistence that we would wait until we were married. If I hadn’t been head over heels I love with him already, that declaration would have done it.
So what does all that have to do with the here and now? I want in some way to pass onto young women a secret trick for how to judge the boys with whom they share those first really intense emotional adventures. I want them to be smart so they wouldn’t need to be so lucky. I don’t have one.
The past is never entirely gone, so I want for them to find a first love who will care for them as mine did for me. I hate to think of how many will have avoidable regrets. Every young woman should be valued as I was, protected as I was, given the standard against which to measure other men.
Except by telling this too-personal story, I don’t know how to show them that.
©2010 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
