I was supposed to lose it with Diane, my first girlfriend, during my senior year in high school. I loved her. Plus, I had no intention of heading off to college with the word "virgin" burned into my loins.

Instead, I lost my virginity during my sophomore year in college, to a chubby, brown-haired, brown-eyed, patchouli-reeking woman named Meadow. To a woman who, only a few months prior to our meeting, had been a member of a disgraced free-love commune. To a woman I did not love.

The Ethan of those days had been testing some nascent principles, some ideals, some highfalutin beliefs. One of them being an equation I was trying to solve: sex = love. Therefore, I had a hard time rectifying the fantasy of the person with whom I had wanted to have sex, with the reality of the person with whom I eventually did.

Why did I finally take the plunge with Meadow? Because Diane drove her Volvo station wagon across my heart.

Slim and blond, Diane had spiky ’80s New Wave hair, wore fuchsia satin tops, and played volleyball and ran track. A year or two before I had met her, her dad had died on the operating table during a routine procedure. My own mother had been destroyed by a brain aneurysm a handful of years before that. Unlike Diane's dad, my mom lived, and her stroke-ridden body and mind hobbled through my adolescence.

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