A few years ago, for example, a charming man from Vancouver hired me every night for a week while he was in Las Vegas for a conference. By the time he went home we’d checked off every item on his wish list, and he was finally comfortable lying naked with another man. It was strangely gratifying to help a guy learn the ropes.

But nothing prepared me for Hector: Thirty-nine years old, handsome, stocky, with a full black beard. Born and raised in Argentina, he lived in Chicago and owned a seat on the stock exchange. He was successful but lonely, and so intensely left-brained that he had carefully engineered a self-improvement plan: He took a sabbatical from work to get himself together. Among other things, he needed to admit he was gay and better understand how that fit into his life. That’s where I came in.

When I first spotted him I thought, “Damn, this guy needs new pictures.” He was much better looking than he’d led me to believe, and more socially adept as well. We clicked instantly. And I don’t know where he learned how, but he kissed like the devil himself.

We had a suite at the Bellagio and spent the weekend like a couple of princes. We went to the spa on Sunday, and then stayed in our bathrobes and ordered appetizers from room service while we watched the Oscars, like two teenagers pretending to be Hollywood royalty.

We also made practical plans, mapping out the next few months on a calendar, scheduling what we’d do and where we’d go. He came back to Las Vegas twice, and we traveled together to Washington (for the cherry blossoms), Provincetown, Montreal, Miami, Hawaii and – wait for it – Paris for the French Open. This was the best gig ever.

Now, I can be what my friends kindly refer to as “an acquired taste.” I have a classic Irish temper, I talk too much, and I tend to be too clever by half. I can also be moody, needing to go off by myself for no discernible reason. So while I wasn’t concerned I’d get bored with Hector, I was a little worried he might get tired of me. But we only had one serious confrontation.

I tried a little too hard to share my love of nude beaches, for which Hawaii is especially famous. He tolerated the one we found on Maui; it was beautiful, and it wasn’t crowded. But the one on the Big Island was another story. It required a treacherous climb to get to, and was filled with too much tie-dye and the kind of bodies no one wants to see naked. Long story short: We didn’t stay very long.

We were spending a few days in Hilo, which is not a town most people recommend. The best hotels haven’t been renovated since the ’70s and there are very few sandy beaches within city limits. As we were driving back, Hector grew quiet, and I tried to fill the air with idle chatter.

“Can we not talk until we get back to the hotel, please?” he asked.

Eventually we stopped for coffee.

“I’m really angry right now,” he started, “so I have to ask you this and hope I get an honest answer.” A beat. “Was that beach the whole reason we came to Hilo?”

I’m not usually very good with confrontation, and my knee-jerk response is to raise my voice. But Hector was calm and his tone was more inquisitive than accusatory, so I tried to follow his lead. “If you knew me any better,” I answered, “I’d be really pissed off that you asked me that question. I don’t manipulate people, and I really don’t like being accused of it.”

“And if I knew you better,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t have to ask. But I do.”

I understood where Hector was coming from, especially given the number of disappointments we’d already met with in Hilo. I explained to him that I didn’t even know about the nude beach until we’d planned to come here. I wanted to come to Hilo for the botanical gardens and the waterfalls we’d seen that morning.

“OK,” he said. “Makes sense. But we’re done with nude beaches.”

It was the only time he ever pulled rank, and within a day the story was a joke between us, the mere mention of Hippie Hollow eliciting mutual groans.

The “Hippie Hollow Incident” was the most mature disagreement I have ever had – including fights with my parents, everyone I’ve ever worked for, and all of my boyfriends. The guy I lived with for four years? We’d have had two weeks of drama and a ruined vacation at the very least. Instead, Hector and I grew closer because of it.  Was this because this was ultimately a business deal and we weren’t arguing as much as negotiating? Or was it because we were especially adept at communicating with each other? Who can say?

Whatever the reasons, the rest of our time together only became more enchanted: sunset dinners on the beach in Kona, orchestra seats for “Follies” at the Kennedy Center, watching Federer’s narrow victory over Monfils from a box at the French Open. It was the kind of magic that would make even a chick-flick aficionado roll her eyes and say, “Yeah, right.” And yet there we were.

Until we weren’t.

The last time I saw Hector was in the Newark airport after we came back from Paris. We’d planned to meet up again in San Francisco for one last week before he returned to work. Instead, he canceled a few days before our meeting. His leave had gone terribly over budget, he said, and he wanted to spend time alone before heading back to work. We’d do a long weekend in the fall, after he’d readjusted to work. Sounded good to me.

I tried to arrange a rendezvous over Thanksgiving and then again over Christmas, but both times he demurred. I was on the East Coast for New Year’s and I asked him if I should stop in Chicago on my way home. He never gave me a straight answer until I pushed the issue. He said it wasn’t a good time.

So our story is unfinished. We send each other text messages several times a week, and I consider him one of my best friends. And yet, I still can’t help wondering what things would be like if we’d met under different circumstances.

Once, while walking along the Seine (you can’t make this stuff up), he told me how sad he was that our time together was drawing to a close. Half-joking, I suggested he take me away from my life of crime and make an honest man of me. He said he wished he could, and I believed him. I still believe him. But I also know that we live in a real world where people click and then discover all kinds of complications. We just happened to know the complications in advance, and then went on the honeymoon, only then to discover how much we liked each other. For now, I continue to mentor guys in the ways of love with other men. Hector has returned to work with confidence, and he has no trouble meeting guys. I encourage him to date. If I know the way Hector’s mind works he won’t even think about embarking on any kind of serious relationship – with me or anyone – until he’s had more practice. In the process he might meet the one guy who’s perfect for him, and good for him if he does.

I know nothing serious could grow between us until I retire from the skin trade. I certainly couldn’t date a hooker – I’m way too insecure for that – and I wouldn’t expect anybody else to. But I’m not planning to escort for the rest of my life. I expect I’ll leave Vegas eventually too; there’s way too much world out there for me to stay in the desert. I don’t expect anything as widescreen as a limo or flowers or being “saved” by anyone (with or without a lot of money); I gave up on that fantasy a long time ago. What’s different for me now is that I’m able to imagine somebody else – maybe Hector, maybe not – in the picture with me on whatever comes next. And that means seeing things through a whole new lens.

Now, before getting all hot and bothered, let’s look at the actual evidence that’s available: This happened before the president arrived in the country. The agents in question are not members of the presidential protective division. Officials have said that some of the agents under investigation “may merely have been attending a party and violating curfew,” according to ABC News. Still, Republican congressmen Peter King (N.Y.) and Darrell Issa (Calif.) have claimed that the incident could leave the agents vulnerable to blackmail.

Dan Emmett, a two-decade Secret Service veteran, disagrees. “I spent six years in the CIA after I left the Secret Service and am well familiar with sexual blackmail espionage,” he told ABC. “It is a tactic, but I just don’t see that here. The Secret Service is not an intelligence organization, it’s law enforcement.” He also noted that prostitution is legal in parts of Colombia and that “this is not a criminal conduct type of situation, it’s strictly personal conduct.” (That’s an important distinction — although it might not spare the agents their jobs: Paul Morrissey, the Secret Service’s assistant director, told CNN that the agency has a “zero tolerance policy on personal misconduct.”)

Rep. Peter King, who was briefed on the investigation, says a “significant number” of the agents involved brought women back to their hotel on the night in question and that the women are “presumed” to be prostitutes. But it hasn’t been confirmed. It’s alleged that one of those women refused to leave the agents’ room the next morning until she was given money, but we have no clue whether there was negotiation over her services before she came to the room, or why there was an alleged disagreement over, or delay in, payment. Based on news reports, it could be that Secret Service agents had a massive orgy with Colombian prostitutes — or that one agent had a date that ended with a disagreement over money. We just don’t know.

No matter: The American public loves a good sex scandal, especially one involving politicians or law enforcement — and with this story, we have have bit of both. We never tire of seeing authority figures felled by their sexual appetites, do we? Stories like this function as an allegory for our own repressed desires, our terror of the power of sex, and fear of losing control. I have but one question: How long before the porn parody is made?

But that hasn’t stopped conservatives from claiming that the drop is a result of, you guessed it, abstinence education and, paradoxically, an increase in abortions.

Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America expressed her outrage over the CDC analysis: “They don’t even mention the fact there’s been a tremendous increase in effectiveness and pervasiveness of abstinence education. They don’t mention the fact that teen sexual activity, by their own admission, is down.” As Think Progress noted this week, teen birth rates are actually highest in states with abstinence-only policies. Not only has it been widely documented that such programs are largely ineffective, it’s also been shown that such programs may prevent contraception use.

Now, it’s true that teens — specifically 15- and 16-year-olds — are delaying sexual activity, but the change in contraceptive use over the years has been much more profound, and there has been no significant change in sexual activity among 18- and 19-year-olds. What’s more, there was no change in sexual activity among teens, period, from 2008 on, says Laura Lindberg, senior research associate at Guttmacher, so the recent decline in teens births certainly can’t be attributed to abstinence. Also, it should be noted that abstinence can be the result of any number of social influences, not necessarily abstinence-only education. (Consider research showing that teens who receive sex education are much more likely to delay sex.)

Bill Albert, chief program officer at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, told me that arguments like Crouse’s have a problem of “simple chronology.” The teen birth rate peaked in 1991, “some years before the federal investment in abstinence education,” he said. “So it’s clearly not responsible for declines that began in 1991.” In fact, he says, “The teen birth rate increased during the height of the federal investment in abstinence education. Those who would credit abstinence [for the decline] should also take the blame for the increases.” Albert added, “Researchers who have looked at it closely over the past several years tend to believe it is contraception that is making the difference. If the abstinence education programs are helping teens to use contraception more consistently, then we should thank them, but I don’t think that’s what they’re doing.”

Crouse isn’t the only conservative twisting the latest CDC news to fit an anti-choice agenda: In a piece titled “Credit Abstinence With Helping Reduce Teen Birth Rates,” on the anti-choice site LifeNews.com, Kristan Hawkins writes, “While the birth rate has fallen, it must be made clear that the CDC is looking at the birth rate and not the pregnancy rate in teens,” and then claims that the teen abortion rate has increased, without citing any evidence. She must have missed this headline from February: “Teen Pregnancy, Abortion Rates at Record Low” — that’s according to research from Guttmacher. In 2008, the most recent year for which data is available, the teen abortion rate was down 59 percent from its peak in 1988.

Hawkins’ next target? Why, contraception, of course. “It cannot be stated enough that 50% of women who are using some form of contraception find themselves unexpectedly pregnant.” Again, she offers no citation, but being a contraception user (i.e., you have used a condom recently) is different from using it correctly every time. According to Guttmacher, 54 percent of women who have had abortions became pregnant during a month when they used contraception — but a minority of those women used the method correctly. She adds that “contraception is not an effective means of preventing pregnancy 100% of the time” — right, just 99.9 percent of the time, in the case of oral contraceptives, when used correctly. (Abstinence, when it’s followed 100 percent of the time, really has that compelling 0.1 percent advantage.)

If anything, such data should recommend a need for better sex education and access to long-term methods of birth control.

My favorite part of her rant, though, is where she equates Plan B with abortion. This anti-science party trick just does not get old! “Most importantly, we cannot the [sic] measure the usage of abortion-causing emergency contraception (Plan B) and the role it is now playing in decreasing teen birth rates.” For the millionth time: Plan B is an emergency contraception. It prevents ovulation and fertilization, just as with all hormonal contraceptives. It does not cause abortion if the egg has already implanted, which is the medical definition of pregnancy, according to both the National Institutes of Health and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. In short: The increase she cites in Plan B use is actually yet more evidence for the argument that greater contraception use caused the decline in teen births.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, either: It happens every time the CDC releases a new report finding a continuing drop in teen pregnancy. What these reactions make clear is that no evidence — whether it’s on the benefits of making contraception widely accessible or the positive impact of comprehensive sex ed — will stop the war on sex. Where there is a scientific study providing such proof, there will be a right-winger willing to gesture vaguely in the direction of mythical evidence to the contrary. “In a way, I’m so tired of this debate,” says Albert. “Why don’t both sides declare victory and go home? If we say, ‘OK, you win,’ can we stop?”

But Hollywood’s ingrained tendency to ignore people over 50 or so — with occasional, ultra-weepy exceptions, in the vein of “Cocoon” or “On Golden Pond” — runs counter to various cultural and demographic realities, both absolute and relative. On one hand, the population is growing older, on average, in the United States and most other Western countries. On the other hand, accepted modes of behavior for older people are shifting. “Late Bloomers” is an entertaining diversion, mostly because Rossellini and Hurt are a pair of seasoned and graceful pros who know how to work every line and every gesture, and it’s great to see them playing characters who are exactly their age. (In real life, Hurt is 62 and Rossellini 59.) But in a certain way the movie feels pretty old-fashioned: I’m not sure the social prejudices Gavras tries to mine for laughs here quite exist anymore.

Hurt’s character, Adam, is supposed to be a prestigious architect nearing retirement age who startles his Italian-born wife, Mary (Rossellini), and colleagues when he starts wearing a leather jacket and jeans to work and going out drinking with much younger colleagues. But for better or worse, the real-world workplace is full of such guys, and I don’t think younger people these days are alarmed to encounter elders who decline to play canasta or don sky-blue golf slacks. Arguably, the trend toward permanently emulating youth is just as ridiculous, in its own way, as is retiring to Scottsdale the moment the Social Security checks start to arrive. But that’s just a function of each generation’s inborn right to make fun of the one that’s slightly older than it.

If anything, it’s Mary who seems like the oddball in “Late Bloomers.” Based on one episode of memory loss, possibly caused by stress or depression, she concludes that both she and Adam are entering a steep downward spiral and starts outfitting their house with bathtub grab-bars, giant-button telephones and other old-people gadgetry. She also gets involved, more intriguingly, with a Grey Panthers group who lobby Adam to build a “transgenerational eco-community” retirement home, one so attractive that it will make “younger people look forward to getting old.” One wishes that Gavras (who is the daughter, by the way, of eminent Greco-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras) had developed this aspect of the story a little further. There are relatively few films about retirement homes (major props here to Sarah Polley’s “Away From Her”) despite the fact — or perhaps because of the fact — that most of us will end up living in them at some stage.

As to the sexuality and romantic life of Adam and Mary, there are two things to say: First, that area isn’t nearly the taboo it used to be either, as the last 15 years or so of Helen Mirren’s career has demonstrated, and second, this is the movies, so don’t look for glaring, naked realism. Isabella Rossellini remains one of the most beautiful women in the world, although she’s clearly not young, and Hurt, while fully looking his age, still cuts a virile figure in his faux-youthful wardrobe. Gavras absolutely has her heart in the right place, and tries to make the point that age is no guarantor of wise behavior, and that people Adam and Mary’s age are just as prone to lust, vanity, egotism and all-around poor decision-making as anyone else. She does, however, fall prey to the general tendency to depict golden-age sexuality as being just the same as younger people’s, only with larger beds, more money and longer periods of time involved.

“Late Bloomers” is a modest Euro-indie with a modest potential audience, but I expect we’ll see a coming boom in romantic yarns made by, for and about the aging boomer and post-boomer populations. Fox has big hopes, for instance, for “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” the forthcoming film from “Shakespeare in Love” director John Madden, which stars Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith and Bill Nighy as a group of British seniors who relocate to India with so-called unexpected results (i.e., romance, renewal, rejuvenation, etc.). That film’s box-office yield will be understood, no doubt, as a test of the showbiz truism I mentioned earlier: Is the 50-plus audience ready to come back to the theaters, and will some number of younger viewers play along?

I don’t claim to know the answer to that, and I’m not sure it’s an interesting or worthwhile question. I do know that movies crafted to pander to older viewers, when they’re imagined as some kind of narrowly defined niche audience, are always less interesting than those — like “Away From Her” or “The Straight Story” or “Harold and Maude” or “About Schmidt” — that dare to imagine aging, with all its unavoidable problems, as a universal and essential element of the human tragicomedy. “Late Bloomers” isn’t anywhere near that level, but at least it’s trying.

“Late Bloomers” is now playing at Cinema Village in New York, with other cities and DVD release to follow.

“Yeah, I figured that out,” I said.

“You did?”

“Of course!” I gulped. “Jessica and me aren’t just friends, either, you know.”

“I had a feeling about that.” She nodded with a faint smile.

Mine was the most amiable coming out story I knew. If only the experience of my early sex life were so breezy.

In our small Cape Cod junior high school, I didn’t know a single openly gay teenager. As a 13-year-old feminist who didn’t shave her legs, I was the closest thing most people got. Before my best friend, Jessica, and I started kissing each other, most of our classmates assumed we already were. In truth, all of my early sexual encounters were with men: thrilling and frightening interactions, marked by my inability to say no. I had the body of a 20-year-old before I even got my first period, and being mistaken for sexually precocious by my peers became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My early exploits with older boys garnered me a reputation as a slut in middle school. Compared to that harassment, it was easier to let people assume I was gay. Being a slut implied an unwieldy desire, an essential vulnerability to sexual need. Whereas being gay just implied a rejection of men. But kissing girls came with its own complications

Bisexuality made sense to me, in theory, before I ever kissed a girl. And this was pre-Madonna kissing Britney Spears, pre-“Girls Gone Wild” (at least in my house, where we watched only PBS). My conception of girls kissing girls was not defined by a male gaze; I grew up with books like “Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism” on the shelves. My mother was a Buddhist therapist, and I had known before our landmark conversation that she not only identified as bisexual but moreover understood that being one was largely unremarkable. It seemed logical to me that people were bisexual until proven otherwise.

My brother and I lived in a house where sexuality was treated with no aura of shame, no tinge of the illicit. There was never any reference to the proverbial “birds and bees,” but our lexicon did include words like “fallopian tubes” and “ovulation.” We were both born at home, and I was even present for my brother’s birth. If I had been a different sort of 4-year-old, I doubt my parents would have allowed this, but in the pictures, I am far from traumatized by my mother’s cries. I am strutting around the birthing room, a toy stethoscope dangling from my neck, and perched between the midwives, attempting to take my mother’s pulse.

Unfortunately, this wholesome experience of the human body couldn’t prevent me from hating my own. By fifth grade, the attention that my precocious figure attracted from men scared me, but it was better than feeling freakish and fat, which was how I’d come to see the C-cup chest I’d exhibited before any other girl my age. And my pulse whirred to the feeling of breath on my neck, hands on my waist; I liked being wanted. Everything that followed those flirtatious entreaties, however, left me numb and ashamed. After a year of crude gestures and loud whispers in school hallways, exploring my nascent attraction to girls seemed a safer path.

In junior high, instead of Katy Perry’s early ’90s equivalent, I was listening to Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl.” Like Kathleen Hanna’s lyrics — Rebel girl you are the queen of my world … I know I wanna take you home / I wanna try on your clothes — my desire for girls was, at first, more romantic than erotic. My lust was meshed with other kinds of longing, with the devotion of friendship and admiration. Jessica and I had a more intimate relationship than any I’d known, and I’d always had intensely intimate friendships with other girls. Kissing seemed, in some ways, not a far leap from cuddling.

And when Jessica kissed me, on the sunlit bedspread of my childhood room, I felt the same delicate churning in my abdomen that I had when the older brother of a friend pressed his lips against my bare shoulder and squeezed my hip with his broad hand. I wished I was gay, that I could elect to direct my body in that seemingly less perilous direction. But when Jessica wearied of being different from everyone else at our school and started spending more time with the soccer team than with me, I wished I didn’t miss her so much, that I could believe a boyfriend was the solution to my heartache.

Instead, I found a solution in Lila — my first official girlfriend. A couple of years my senior, Lila had ceased attending our local public high school in favor of what appeared to be a liberally defined home schooling. She had short, messy hair; didn’t wear makeup; and introduced me to Otis Redding and Kristin Hersh. Years later, I discovered girls who dressed like boys, and thus discovered my true type, but at the time, she was a revelation. When my little brother starting dating Lila’s little sister, Maya, the four of us would spend afternoons riding ramshackle bicycles down the rural miles between our homes, cooking vegetarian meals, and then making out in our respective bedrooms.

If this post-’60s Rockwellian teenage vision makes my hometown sound like some kind of East Coast Berkeley, it is a misconception. Our town was a liberal one, relative to other small towns, but we were the exception, not the rule. I was tired of feeling like an outsider in my school, and tired of school altogether, which I’d already decided was not the quickest way to become a writer — my plan since childhood. I officially dropped out after freshman year, and replaced it with my own reading list, and Lila.

But if I’d thought that removing myself from the mainstream would solve my sexual conflicts, I was wrong. Lila had conflicts, too. Under the covers of her bed, I grew to know a certain shadow that would fall over her face — a look that often preceded tears. Neither of us ever fully articulated those doubts, but I knew that something in our sex scared her. I thought I recognized the tinge of shame. Perhaps the teenage girl secure in her sexuality is a chimera altogether, but being queer in a homophobic society tends to present special challenges, regardless of your background. The fear I felt kissing Lila in public caught me off guard. There was a part of me that wondered if I wasn’t really just straight. Did I have a choice? Was being straight the easier choice, in the long run? How much had my mother’s experience influenced me? When not dry humping each other’s legs to Tori Amos, Lila and I were often crying, without really knowing why.

But despite the drama that infused our relationship, there’s no way I can dismiss it as experimentation. What part of love is ever not an experiment, however high the stakes? And I was in love. Being with girls was a safer place to explore my feelings, partly because they also seemed to have a lot of them, but it was also sexually exciting. There were so many prescriptions for how to love men, and how to screw them. Or rather, be screwed by them. The sexual passivity that I had been surreptitiously socialized in did not apply to sex with women. In my childhood bedroom, I had lifted Jessica’s T-shirt, moved my mouth down her chest, squeezed her hips with both hands. Lila and I might have had a maudlin relationship a lot, but we also spent most of our time together in bed. The excitement that had always been cut short by actual sexual contact with men went on for hours with her. Looking back, our love seems almost chaste — no toys, no talk, incidents of head I could count on one hand — but it was my first introduction to a desire that my body was able to consummate. I didn’t orgasm with a lover until the girlfriend after her, but it was with Lila that I first experienced my body (and hers) as a pleasurable place to inhabit.

It was also a lot easier to convince my dad to let my girlfriend sleep over on school nights.

My father is a sea captain, and so would often return after a three-month voyage to find me considerably changed. After one such return, he pulled into his driveway (my parents had split years before) and turned up the radio. “I Kissed a Girl” — Jill Sobule’s folky precurser to Katy Perry’s club hit — filled the minivan: I kissed a girl, her lips were sweet/she was just like kissing me.

“So,” drawled my dad, with an awkward smile. “I hear you’ve been doing some of that lately.”

“Daaaaad!” I rolled my eyes, and unclasped my seat belt.

I was mortified, having no clue how lucky I was. A far cry from disturbed by my broad view of potential romantic partners, my father seemed to find it somewhat charming. Though he never knew the sexual harassment I suffered as a result of my earliest sexual experiences, it’s easy to see how much safer Lila must have appeared than the sketchy older boys I had a penchant for. Also, I think he probably associated me with my mother, whose bisexuality he also found unthreatening. Understandably, I think he’d have rather seen both of us with women.

To that end, I’ve been asked more than once if I think it’s hereditary. I don’t. I try not to be offended by the suggestion. On the Kinsey scale, my mother and I probably both hover near a 3. Of course, it’s not for me to exclude a genetic component with any certainty; I’m a writer, not a scientist, though I strongly suspect that it has a lot more to do with nurture than nature.

Since those days, I’ve been in love and lust with close to an equal number of men and women (not excluding a few who identified as somewhere between the two poles). At 31, I spend very little time entertaining definitions of my own sexuality. Thank god. I do not miss those early days of wishing I could be one thing or another, of wondering if I had an obligation to push myself in either direction. There was an important moment, a few years later, when I came to the startling understanding that I fell in love with people, that individuals’ personalities, pheromones and even fashion sense were more compelling to me than their gender. This is a cliché, of course. But I came to it on my own, and in the vacuum of my own experience, it was a true revelation.

Arriving at such a revelation, at such an age, and greeting it with the happy satisfaction that I did, requires a freedom that I had the privilege of taking for granted as a young person, though I know better now. Most of us circle back around to the models we were given in our formative years — not in terms of who we love, but how we love. It sounds stupid, but I am good at falling in love. That is, I do so with abandon, free of any reluctance born from shame. I feel entitled to love whomever I do, and as an adult, I have always fallen in love fully and frequently. Perhaps this is an innate human quality; I suspect so. But it is also a delicate, malleable impulse. We love as we have been loved, and as love has been shown to us. And I was loved with great abandon, and earnestly encouraged to love whomever my heart called for. And I know whom to thank for that.