For a very long time, I was deathly afraid of girls.  Or rather I was afraid of being alone with them.
 

Once they hit puberty, they were a complete mystery to me.  What did they want?  What could you talk about before proceeding to sex?  
 

I knew sex was on my mind all the time.  But I had very little knowledge of females.  Did you just talk about the weather?  Did you talk about sports?  Were you supposed to kiss them?  When?  
 

By the time I was 14, I was already above average in height.  I was well coordinated. I did not wear glasses.  I was not ugly.  But put me in a room with a girl and I immediately looked for the exit.  Especially good looking girls.  Let’s face it, I was a geek.  Very smart apparently according to my teachers and according to my marks in school but I didn’t really believe it.
 

I told everyone I wasn’t actually smart.  I could just remember everything I heard or read.  It was a memory trick, not real intelligence, which I thought was the capacity to figure things out or create something out of nothing.  I couldn’t do that.  I couldn’t even figure out how to relate to females.
 

Girls kept asking me out on dates, once to the Sadie Hawkins dance at school.  I still see the picture of the girl with me as we are holding hands, me talking to the guys and she looking in the other direction and doing the same.  I am sorry to say, those who asked me out kept being disappointed.  I really had no clue of what I was to do.
 

I would plan my trips to and from school so as to avoid having to walk with any girls because then, I would have to find something to say for 10 minutes.
 

When I overheard one girl say she liked me, I teased her for it mercilessly until she found me repugnant.  At least that way I didn’t have to talk to her, heaven forbid.
 

My major success was to creep into the girls’ cabin at camp when I was almost 13 and awake one of the girls with a kiss.  As she stared at me groggily, I, following the instructions of other males who had told me what I was to do, said I liked her.  She nodded sleepily and I crept back out.
 

That was it.  I didn’t dare speak to her again all summer but we kept on giving each other very meaningful looks.
 

You can’t imagine how much courage this took at the time, as I was paralyzed with fear in the presence of the other girls.  She just looked kind and I bet my life on that look.  For once I was right.
 

I was not right very often.  Nor did I venture to speak much to anyone else of the other gender for years until I was 15.   
Now I was on the basketball team, I was supposed to be popular.  A circle of Jewish girls who lived further north in Toronto, now discovered me and I was asked out several times.  I don’t think I asked anyone out who didn’t ask me first.  How could I ask them before knowing whether they would say yes?  Since they asked me, I started to find life a little more bearable.
 

By the time I was 17, I could claim that I had gone out on dates.  I even found the courage to ask out an Italian girl but that was cheating too, because everyone told me she liked me.  I learned from that date that you could like someone without there being any other particular chemistry at work.
 

I picked up one Chinese girl at the school dance but was very nervous when I took her home.   According to my friends, if she liked me too much, her family would kidnap me and force me to marry her.  The good night kiss was a bit awkward.
 

I discovered two things at the same time.  I found it easier and easier to talk to the smart girls in the class, to exchange tips about homework and to flirt for hours on the phone.  In fact, I could talk more easily and openly with them than with the guys.  With guys, I could never talk about feelings, only ideas, things or sports.
 
I also discovered girls admired my intelligence and liked to talk to me.  Several communicated their attraction to me, but I still did not know what to do.  Indeed, any open show of desire on their part made me feel extremely uncomfortable.
 

When one of the girls in the school put her arms around my neck when we were working together on a project after class and moved her face close to mine, I told her I really had to go to the bathroom.   What must she have thought of me!
 

One of the Jewish girls I dated, invited me in at the end of the date to meet her parents, Yiddish speaking Holocaust survivors.  All very nice, except that on my way out, with her father standing beside us, she gave me the kind of embrace that is hard to forget.  She French kissed me and ground her pelvis into my groin while her father just sort of looked away and coughed.  I was mortified and although we actually got along quite well, I found it difficult to ask her out again.
 

The next few years, I continued this pattern of approach/avoidance.  I could take each incident and relate it as a separate story but the pattern was always the same.  I was looking for something I could not find while any expression of desire made me feel tremendous guilt.   Some would say I was repressed.   And some would say my mother taught me well.  I did eventually venture further along the path of desire.  But the sensation that I would not go where I was not wanted has never left me.  The pull between desire, guilt and responsibility has always been there.   It has shaped my relations with women but also with the world.  And you know what?  After all these years, I’m almost used to it.