father

I’ll admit straight off that I had my own stereotypes about teenagers who had children. I thought they were ‘irresponsible’- I mean we all know you can end up pregnant if you’re sexually active and not careful right? I had a picture in my head of the girls who ended up in that situation, and the picture in my head did not look like me. I was from a good family, I was a great student, and I was pretty popular. When I started dating, I was dating older guys (you know, the ‘mature’ ones). But then there was this one guy. He made it clear he wanted to marry me early on, that he didn’t see the point to dating at all if the end result wasn’t going to be marriage. We used to argue about it. My parents had just divorced and I wasn’t really that sold on the idea of marriage, but he was extremely persistent, and he would actually get really upset if I implied I wasn’t going to marry him. And I felt like ‘wow’ this guy really, really loves me and wants to be with me forever. At a certain point I told him that I didn’t want to be in a sexual relationship, and I was really clear about why. We argued about that too. He told me that he had proved he loved me, and that I couldn’t really love him if I didn’t want to give myself to him like that. He told me there was no difference between what I was asking for and just being friends. He told me that if I didn’t want to be with him physically it had to be because I was sleeping with someone else. It ended up sounding a lot like I was just …