FN Blog - Seven heads are better than one!

From the time I hated boys up until the time I loved them, I was in a Catholic all-girls school. We had scheduled weekly confessions with our resident priest, masses every first Friday, retreats and rosary marathons and very few encounters with the opposite sex. From the chaste nuns and my confused peers, I learned important guidelines on how to behave around boys I like - and still go to heaven.

Rule #1: You only went steady with a guy after at least three months of making you ligaw. There’s magic in threes, and so, three months was a good time to start calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend. But a fine print to this rule is that you should never go beyond holding hands while in the ligawan phase. I followed this too.

Rule #2: Kiss (with tongue) only after at least two months of being official. My high school best friend frenched her boyfriend after just one month together. We kept it a secret for fear of having her labeled as a harlot by our peers.

Rule #3: There’s a make-out timetable. First comes beso, then comes smack on the lips, then French, then you get to feel my boobs on top of my clothes. After two months, you can feel my boobs under my school blouse, but still over my bra. And so on and so forth. I made this one up to avoid confusion for me and my boyfriend. At least he knew when and where to go every two months.

Rule #4: You can do everything but you-know-what. With very heavy breathing and a timetable in my head, I always managed to avoid losing it and going to hell for a very looooong time. My high school and college sweetheart (one and the same person, by the way, as the man who now shares my conjugal bed), also came from a Catholic all-boys school and he didn’t want to go to hell either.

I followed these rules but due to raging hormones, did break a couple of rules too.

Rule Broken #1: It’s a sin to kiss in the dark. This was shared to me by a fellow all-girls school friend. She said their nuns lectured them on this rule. I had broken it before I knew it was a sin. So I thought there was no use trying to follow it since I had broken it already.

Rule broken #2: It’s a sin to kiss a boy lying down. I swear our school priest told me this while I was on our yearly retreat. So you’re only supposed to kiss standing up or sitting down. Lying down can get too comfy and lead to, you-know-what.

I was determined to go to heaven, and so a good high school friend of mine bought me a book from the retreat house we were staying in in Tagaytay. I read it while covered in my boyfriend’s high school jacket, spritzed with his cologne. Apparently, you can get pregnant even without having sex! There’s like a .0000001 percent of that happening. I swear it was in the book. What a shock! I thought maybe it could happen if you were dry-humping (which I hadn’t tried at that point yet, but have heard more experienced girls talking about it). Dry humping: rubbing your private parts together but with no penetration. How scary. I spread the word to warn my classmates. I thank this piece of information for my pregnancy scare at fourth year high school. I hadn’t had sex yet, hadn’t even gone to third base, but I was delayed and I thought I might become the.000001 statistic. Buti na lang it was just a scare. Whew.

So I went on to go to college to a still Catholic, but coed university. The same one my boyfriend went to from prep to high school. He went to the state university with no religion. And so with the loss of guidelines, came the loss of other things. But that’s a whole other topic.