"But," Beth leaned forward and whispered through clenched teeth, "you just said you were falling in love with me!?"
"I did, I am," I stammered, "but—"
"Then why don't you want to sleep with me anymore?"
"I didn't say that."
"Yes you did! You just said you wanted to stop having sex."
What I had said was that I wanted to stop having intercourse and, frankly, I didn't understand why this was such a big deal. We'd been, or at least I thought we'd been, more than happy with the sex we were having before she decided she was ready to lose her virginity and I didn't see why that kind of sex would be any less satisfying now.
Beth wasn't having any of it, though. The more I tried to tell her I was not trying to kick her out of my bed or my life, the more she seemed to think that was precisely what I was trying to do. It was as if she all-of-a-sudden couldn't imagine sex without genital penetration, or as if penetration were a right I was trying to deprive her of and that she had to fight like hell to preserve. Or, though this only occurred to me later, as if she thought I was lying through my teeth.
The argument had started when I asked Beth what she thought she would do if she got pregnant. I was twenty one, she was twenty—this was two or three years before the episode I told you about earlier, when I imagined myself beating her up—and we were sitting huddled over the last spoonfuls of the sundaes we'd ordered at the Friendly's restaurant where her sister worked.
"So, what do you think you'd do?" I asked, pressing to break the silence which had been her initial response.
"I don't know," she said.
"What do you mean you don't know?"
"I don't know…I've never thought about it."
"How could you not have thought about it? You're the one who gets pregnant!"
"Look, I said I don't know! Why are you asking me anyway?"
I was asking because of the last word had by a fifteen-year-old girl in the youth group discussion I'd been leading about premarital sex the day before I drove up to Beth's house to spend the weekend the first night of which our argument had already ruined: "I think," this girl had said, "that there's nothing wrong with having sex outside of marriage and nothing wrong with not having sex, but, if two people are going to have sex, they damned well better talk about what they think they'll do if the woman gets pregnant." The girl's name, if I remember correctly, was Courtney, and I remember that I stared at her speechless for about ten seconds before I declared the discussion over and sent the group on to their next activity for the day.
That night, I couldn't sleep. Beth and I had not had the conversation Courtney was talking about, and I felt embarrassed by the wisdom of Courtney's words. More to the point, though, Courtney's statement made me realize that while I knew what I thought should happen if Beth got pregnant—given how young and unprepared for parenthood we were, it seemed to me self-evident that she ought to have an abortion—I'd never thought about the possibility that not only Beth's idea of what should happen, but also her choice in the event she were confronted with having to choose, might be very different.
So I asked, and the answer I got, that Beth didn't know what she thought, scared me, because if she didn't know what she would do—no, more than that, if she'd never even thought about what she would do, or if she had thought about it but was unwilling to tell me, then the meaning of the possible consequences of the sex we were having was completely beyond my control. Beth held in her hand, entirely out of my reach, the power to make a reality in my life, or not, the fatherhood that was by definition implicit for me each time I entered her body.
We were, of course, using birth control, and so it wasn't like we had to hold our breaths each time and hope that she wasn't pregnant, but birth control can fail and, besides, the more I thought about it and the more Beth resisted talking about it, the more I came to realize there was a principle involved: the meaning of sex in my life should not be defined by anyone's choices other than my own, and so, since there was no question in my mind that the decision about what to do if Beth became pregnant was ultimately and irrevocably hers, to continue having sex with her if she would not talk to me about what she thought pregnancy would mean to her was to fail in an obligation I owed to myself to be responsible and accountable for the sexual choices I made. I was not ready even to think about being a father; Beth had the power to make me one whether I wanted it or not. I wanted to be able to choose when and whether to risk that she might, and I wanted to make that choice in the context of our choosing together what risks we were willing to take as a couple I was falling in lover with her, as she had said she was with me, and it seemed to me foolhardy to risk that love and the emerging and still very fragile commitment we felt for each other on something as easily preventable as an unwanted pregnancy. For that, though, I needed her to talk to me.
It wasn't that I was trying to blackmail Beth into giving me an answer right there and then, though I recognize now she might have felt that way, but if she wasn't ready to have this discussion—and her resistance had made it clear to me that it was a discussion we had to have—then it seemed to me we ought to avoid all risk until she was ready, and that meant not having intercourse. I was willing to wait. All I wanted was a promise from her that she would think about it and that, when she was ready to talk, she would tell me. I would, I told her, accept whatever decision she came to—even if what she came to was that she had no idea what she would do if she got pregnant—and I understood entirely that she might change her mind were she actually to become pregnant, but it would be a shame for us to have to have this discussion after it was too late.
"What do you mean you're 'willing to accept' whatever decision I come to?" Beth wanted to know.
"I mean," I said, "that I will not try to change your mind."
"And sex?" she responded.
"Once you have some idea where you stand," I said, "then we can decide how much risk we're willing to take."
"We can decide?"
"Yes, we can decide," I said.
"And if I get pregnant?" the fear in her voice was palpable.
"If you get pregnant, that's something we'll have to deal with when it happens, but at least if we've talked about it beforehand, we'll be better prepared to figure things out together." This insight was new to me, though I didn't quite know how to articulate it at the time: that if we waited until she was pregnant to talk about this, the positions we would be talking from would more likely be ones focused on ourselves as individuals than on who we were as a couple.
"Look, Beth," I continued, "this is unknown territory for me too, and scary, and I don't know how to prove to you that I want to have this conversation because I want our relationship to keep getting stronger, but that is why I want to have it. If you don't want to talk about it now, that's fine, but until we do talk, I want to stop having intercourse."
"Okay," she said, though I could tell she was not happy about it, "I'll tell you when I'm ready."
