I understood why this kind of question from Travis would be so upsetting. There was very little chance Travis really wanted to know about my kissing ability. What his question was really meant to do was tell Joey he thinks he is less of a man for not kissing his girlfriend of over two years.
So I guess this meant that word was out about us. People were talking behind our backs. People were passing judgements. And apparently, the verdict was not favorable.
We hadn’t kept our dating standards a secret but we didn’t openly bring them up or flaunt them. Some people asked us directly about them and we told them. Most our closest friends knew and respected our decisions. But friends of friends, or peripheral friends like Travis, didn’t hear it from us nor did they understand our reasoning behind it. Hence, it would seem, the teasing.
It’s funny. Most my girl friends would hear our story and swoon over it. They ate it up. They thought it was so sweet we were waiting to kiss. Guys are different though. Even my brother made a point to tell me that he had already kissed his girlfriend of less than a year while Joey and I had been together for over two years and still never kissed. It seemed very few people understood us besides us.
Sometimes I didn’t even understand us. I mean, how long should we wait to kiss? I wondered. I think in the back of my mind I envisioned waiting until we were engaged. But sometimes that seemed light years away. Could we wait that long? Did we need to wait that long? Can you even plan this sort of thing? Will I be a good kisser? Will Joey?
Maybe we should find out, I thought. Maybe it was about time we start kissing. All I would have to do would be to turn my head up toward his. My eyes would reveal my thoughts. The desire was there. The desire was always there. It was hard to ignore or control. But the fact is, we did control it and God had blessed our relationship so much already because we had chosen to honor him in this area. Amongst all the confusion and questions in my head, my heart knew the answers. For whatever reason, waiting was the path chosen for us. We could walk that path, even when it seemed to be passing slowly.
Some of these thoughts came out as we talked. Sometimes we sat in silence for a while. I confessed to Joey that night one of my biggest fears of the moment. I worried that Joey would be forced to kiss another girl before he kissed me. It wasn’t as much of an impossibility as it sounds. Joey was in drama at school. He was good. Too good, in fact. I knew that come spring, he would get an excellent role in the spring musical. I also knew that oftentimes the top roles in those plays require a kiss between two characters. What if he got a kissing role? What if he had to kiss a girl in the play? What if it was one of our friends? What would we do then? What if his first kiss is a stage kiss and not a kiss with me?
These are the sorts of things that swirled around in my seventeen year old brain. They all seem silly to me now, but at the time, these thoughts consumed me. I wish I would have known then that the spring play would turn out to be My Fair Lady. While Joey would do an outstanding job playing the role of Freddie and singing “On the Street Where You Live,” he would not be forced to kiss anyone. Whew!
Our conversation continued on. Joey very confidently told me that I had nothing to worry about with the drama department or any future play. And as far as guys like Travis, we could live with that. After Joey’s initial knee-jerk reaction of wanting to punch Travis, he got over it. He concluded that he didn’t care what people thought or said. He was confident we were doing the right thing for our relationship. We weren’t doing the easy thing. We weren’t necessarily doing the popular thing. We weren’t expecting others to do exactly the same things we were doing. We would undoubtably continue to run into people who didn’t understand. But for us, we were confident this was the best path for us to follow.
Joey put his arm around my shoulders and held me close as he prayed that evening outside the shed in my backyard. He prayed that the Lord would give us wisdom to make these tough choices. He prayed that God would give us strength to stand firm in our choices. And he prayed that somehow, in some way, God would use our choices as an example or a blessing to those around us.
