Love, InshAllah Page 9

  The only thing that was different was Dean. He started to change. Our evenings together became awkward, as if we were moving backward in time to the clumsiness of a first date. When I’d sit down next to him and snuggle up close, he’d scoot back. When I would hold his hand, it was like he was keeping track of how long I was holding it for. If I laughed too loudly, he looked at me like I was hiding something. And then I got the speech:

  “Um, this is really hard to say, but I thought I was pretty clear that I’m not looking for a relationship, you know . . . I think you kind of like me too much . . . It’s awesome hanging out with you, and I still want to be friends, but I kind of need my space.”

  I felt like a fool.

  Though I had come to see that not all men were after only one thing, I also realized that men could be duped by the emphasis on virginity, too. Dean had felt my virginity as a burden, and now he thought he had to decide whether I would become his whore or his wife.

  I was heartbroken about losing my friendship with Dean after he panicked over his “responsibility” toward me. But I felt freer, too. My mother had been right about the significance of my hole, but for me it wasn’t about protecting my virginity. My experiences and choices were being guided by something much more sacred than that: I had learned about my body, and about what it was like to get what I wanted. I felt much older and wiser than the girl I had been only weeks before. I finally felt like a woman.

  Sex by Any Other Name

  Insiya Ansari

  It was two in the morning, and I was frolicking on an air mattress in the middle of my living room with a guarded man. We’d met a month earlier while I was on a work-related trip. After an extended period of phone flirtation, he had flown in from the other end of the state for the weekend so that we could get to know each other better in person.

  At the beginning of his trip, we were just friends, but by the third night, we’d advanced to benefits. We were fondling and flattering each other to a soundtrack of hungry, labored respiration, when he bumped up against the sexual glass ceiling that had loomed over all my serious relationships to date.

  We’d been chatting between kisses, and the interstitial conversation had just turned to sex. I delivered the bombshell: I’d been with my last boyfriend for five years and we had never done it. The groping froze. A moment later, he proclaimed firmly, “Well, that definitely ain’t me.” Meaning: I’d never wait five years for sex with any woman––capisce? The familiar acidic disappointment hit my gut, and then I felt indignant. A slow-unfolding relationship wouldn’t satisfy this one, even if biding his time without sex meant he could end up with a queen like me.

  I am a girl with an ample sense of self-worth. I possessed it even during my awkward teenage years, because I was cosseted and adored by my family. Unlike with many other first-generation American Muslim girls, my parents didn’t impose rules to mirror the strictures of their own upbringings in India (which had, nonetheless, been forward-thinking for their time). I hadn’t been reduced to sneaking around with boyfriends, and my parents even tolerated it when those boys were “Americans,” as they referred to anyone who was either white or black.

  With these affordances, I cycled through at least one boyfriend every year. But each relationship played out in my home, under the watchful eyes of my parents, who allowed us to hang there only if my bedroom door was wide open. One of these boyfriends, a chocolate brown South Indian whom my father dismissed as a raffish thug, managed to get me alone in his bedroom regularly during my sophomore year in high school. He’d ease me onto the bed hopefully, and we’d kiss and grind, never even toying with the button of his baggy purple denim shorts.

  About a half hour of that would bring us to the outer limits of my sexual concession zone. I’d unfailingly extract myself with a semiapologetic smile and walk down the hill to my parents’ house. This relative chastity was a direct outgrowth of parental enmeshment, as described by a crude maxim in our dialect that essentially means I was “all up in my parents’ armpits.” Collective values went unspoken. I understood that unlike for the loose Americans I’d grown up around, having sex was tantamount to growing dreadlocks, stretching my earlobe with a gauge, or declaring myself agnostic. And I’d never experienced any counterpressure that was convincing enough to make me disrespect my parents. Therefore, I never had to endure that most embarrassing of parent-adolescent rituals, “The [don’t get pregnant, use a condom] Talk.”

  My parents have always called themselves liberal Muslims. While I was growing up, they prayed namaz about as often as they drank beer and wine––neither was regular practice, nor occasioned only by a holiday––and they paid interest on our home. These behaviors countered conventional orthodoxy; some are considered haram. My parents weren’t the sort to pull the “because I said so” card, and for the most part, my brother and I didn’t push the limits. But bohemian and secular my parents were not. They were devout believers in the Qur’an’s historical narrative, and their cultural values were dictated by an Islamic worldview that was shared throughout our community, a close-knit Shiite minority sect. Within the extended community, news of a hellion child spread fast. I was not very newsworthy until, at eighteen, I met my first love.

  Much as I cherished the notion that my relationship with Michel was a love for the ages, it looked a lot like a pop-culture trope: Virginal, Coddled Ingenue Gets Stars Crossed with Dangerous /Broken Casanova. (See: Grease, Dirty Dancing, various Molly Ringwald flicks.) I met him in a program that attracted young writers from divergent backgrounds. He’d throw smoldering looks across the room, before he turned his attention to our peers in the program and let rip with impossibly confident, cogent rants about everything from criminal justice to teen moms to the conspicuous consumerism of his broke friends dizzied by their obsession with the latest Jordans. Michel had nearly been denied his high school diploma because of a pitiful attendance record, but I wasn’t alone in believing that he was brilliant.

  Initially, I was much more taciturn than he was in those meetings, slightly intimidated by the big personalities and strong opinions. When Michel first began flirting with me, I assumed it was because I was fresh meat. When we weren’t at work on projects, the testosterone-amped office atmosphere regressed to locker-room antics, the boys assiduously ranking each girl’s dateability.

  But when Michel and I were together, he’d lose the machismo. He’d make himself vulnerable, dropping his lids over huge, almond-shaped eyes to fully appreciate an affecting song on the radio, while urging me to do the same. He was genuinely present, and I responded with rapt attention. We were both as inquisitive as we were voluble, and a conversation that started with the typical exchange of childhood anecdotes would spiral out into a full-throated debate that folded in topics from gangsterism to interracial dating to international water rights to maternal attachment.

  He told me that I was the first girl with whom he wanted to talk as often as he wanted to kiss her. And I was a “faith over fuck-ups” type, constantly expressing my confidence that he could climb out of hood life to attain the professional victories that he dreamed of.

  My parents, in our first truly painful schism, decided Michel was a scoundrel the first time they met him. As I became more wayward, serially ditching my college classes, they blamed him for sucking me into his vortex of troublemaking. They didn’t appreciate his intelligence. Rather, my father seemed to feel Michel was too slick––even when, or maybe because––he stooped his long neck, softened his voice, and answered questions with “Yes, sir . . . no, sir.”

  I, on the other hand, was outright disrespectful, challenging my parents to “give me just one reason!” why they didn’t like him, and becoming sullen when they came up with five or more. I began to stay out until dawn, sometimes leaving the house just a few hours later with no more than ten words to my parents in between.

  Even as Michel’s appearance in my life felt transformative, my parents’ concerns about our differences weren’t entirely off the mar
k. We were each bewildered by the others’ sexual values. Michel was a monument to virility, a playa’s playa. I made it clear at the beginning of our relationship that I was “waiting until I was married” to have sex. Never mind that the notion of marriage was an abstraction to me. All I knew with certainty was that it was a handy demarcation for the Before and After of sexual intimacy. My sexual values had never caused problems in my relationships before, and since I didn’t know what we were missing, I never knew how much I was asking Michel to give up.

  This presented a moral quandary for Michel, since he was falling in love with me, despite my abstinence. To attest to how smitten he was, he’d describe his peers’ reactions when they heard that Michel was in a celibate relationship: “You, patna? C’mon.” “So, y’all still ain’t f&*#ed?” They were counting down to the day when I’d inevitably give in to Michel’s charms. He was magnetic and sexually experienced in equal measure. He’d begun having sex when he was fifteen. Before he knew of my jealous streak, which was voracious for anecdotes of past girlfriends to obsess over, he’d share tantalizing details, curious to see my reaction. He told me a story about being jailed briefly, and then released in the middle of the night. Hungry for sex, he sought relief with a repulsive-looking girl from the neighborhood known for her loose lips. Although the anecdote shocked me, it also comforted me as I placed it squarely in the rearview: I figured that was the kind of behavior that he had gotten out of his system after all his teenage exploits. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

  It took only six months for Michel to begin cheating––at least, as far as I was able to trace. But it took a year before I was faced with evidence that, even through my fog of infatuation, was undeniable. I caught a friend of his in a lie about a night they’d supposedly been together, when I called to inquire about the friend’s injury. Short of his saying, “What broken leg?” everything about his response made it clear the story was a cover-up.

  The truth tumbled out over the phone while Michel was out of town. He was in the rural South, helping a friend relocate from California. I was still in college and living at home with my parents. Unwilling to wait for him to return, I made my first big purchase on a credit card to fly out to meet him and seek an answer for my bewilderment. I held on to a faint hope that the irregular phone connection had produced some grotesque misunderstanding on my part, even though at some point he’d quietly said of the first indiscretion, “Baby, this is just a rock from the mountain of lies that our relationship is built on.”

  After I arrived, we spent the first night crying, with his head buried in my lap as he apologized again and again. The next day, his friend’s batty auntie who lived next door to the guesthouse where he was staying told the rest of her family that we’d spent the night moaning bawdily. In a twisted attempt at defending my honor, Michel poured sugar in her van’s gas tank. The engine easily revved to life the next morning and she drove away, leaving us on the lot alone. I spent the morning feeling angry and ashamed. Couldn’t she tell the difference between sex and elegiac despair?

  Stockholm syndrome is the only plausible psychoanalysis I can come up with for what happened that night, and for my overall reaction to the greatest betrayal I’d experienced. Michel and I were bored and frustrated, stuck in the backcountry without transportation. We’d been staring each other down from opposite ends of the thin mattress, and his explanations for the transgressions hadn’t gotten any more coherent––how could they, when the acts were so muddled within his own psyche? I’d pressed him all I could.

  Seized with a panicked thought that I would have to return to the generally unchallenging life I’d had without him, I folded myself into his arms. The role reversal commenced in earnest, and suddenly I was the one stroking his brow and kissing him. The warmth turned to heat, and the mutual comforting transitioned into desire. Later that night, we had sex.

  Sex. It’s been more than ten years since that night, and this unequivocal label still makes me recoil. In my mind, what Michel and I did that night was something different—what a friend later called “The Dip.” I finally let him enter me, but I didn’t give in to the throes of unbridled intercourse. It was an approximation: controlled and tentative, and haunted by post-cheating sadness. When I reflected on the “why” soon after, I told myself that some act resembling the sexual activity he was used to would satisfy the desire that had brought us to this point in the first place.

  Of course, it was a fool’s bargain, a circumscribed compromise that I also assumed would keep me, within the most narrow of definitions, a virgin. By then I’d read several novels in which a night like this ended with a white sheet on a backyard clothesline, fluttering in the breeze and dotted with blood: the victory flag of a man newly married to a God-fearing Muslim girl. I threw out the superficial physiology lessons we’d all snickered at in junior-high sex ed and instead called upon this definition, which I took to mean that if there was no penetration, we were still engaging in heavy foreplay and nothing more. So on this night, and a few others, I crossed a line without crossing The Line. We’d be fooling around, and when I thought we were in a danger zone, I’d press my palms to his stomach and guide his body away from me slightly, like intuitive adjustments made to a ship’s course according to shifting winds. Most of the people whom I’ve shared this tale with can’t quite believe that I could have been so reckless, and confused, and naive.

  Oh, trust me, I tell them. Before that fateful phone call from the South, I had ignored plenty of evidence about Michel’s flirtation with other women, because I believed (and still do) that he loved me deeply.

  For more than a year, I had watched Michel struggle with his duality: the tender, impassioned humanist, contrasted with the napuck, or brat, that my parents had recognized in him from the start. It was contagious; I turned into the poster child for Trying to Please Everyone While Pleasing No One. I was even worse at the balancing act than Michel.

  When I was home, I was acutely aware of how disappointed my parents were that I was still dating him, and how they seemed to glower even more when I became antsy to leave, hogging the cordless phone as I checked for messages from you-know-who. When he did call, I’d up and leave at a moment’s notice to meet him. I couldn’t remember the last time my parents, my brother, and I had eaten dinner together as a family.

  And what’s more, The Dip itself was a bust. There was no freedom in it, and guilt flared up in both Michel and me and repelled us from the temporary bonded state we’d reached. He knew I was unhappy defying my parents, and with him, my suspicion fueled increasingly controlling behavior. Within six months, Michel was cheating again, and more flagrantly than before.

  Partly, I stayed so long because I believed my youthful indiscretion would be justified if we managed to stay together and vanquish our obvious incompatibility. After Michel and I had to let go, through my next relationship, I tried to vanquish the sex itself.

  My next long-term boyfriend was utterly devoted, loving, and willing to be patient with me, even in the shell-shocked state I was in after Michel. Our sex life unfolded completely on my terms. I remember reading an article at the time about “born-again virgins”––Christian girls who had sex and then decided to return to abstinence, presumably to reclaim a moral and spiritual high ground. I hated the term but decided to try out the approach.

  Like Michel, my new man wasn’t Muslim, nor was he otherwise religious, but he was willing to entertain this “born-again” status. He was significantly older and had already been in several long-term relationships. He seemed settled, and he was focused on the horizon, hoping we’d get married. We were together five years, and he was just as devoted to my newfound piety as I was, never once implying that I’d lose him if I didn’t loosen up. But the sexual repression I was imposing on myself didn’t feel right. I wish I could say that from being with Michel, I’d gained clarity that sex before marriage is ruinous. But it taught me more about what I didn’t believe: that because I had pushed up against a prohibition, I’d a
lso traded in my status as an observant Muslim.

  That’s not because I took issue with Islamic precepts around premarital sex, like some of my friends, who wrote them off as irrelevant to their modern lives. I just wasn’t convinced that this one transgression negated all my other religious virtues.

  In that sense, getting right with God was the easy part. But the post-Michel celibacy wasn’t driven by conviction––it was a shelter under which I could heal, without having to reconcile my past experimentation with a religious and sexual practice that would feel right moving forward.

  Ten years after Michel, I came to the brink again, faced with the toll of the hard work I’d shirked. This time, it was with the guy on the air mattress. A year after we met, the struggle over sex was again driving a wedge in our relationship. He was asking for an open relationship, and rather than feel the pain of that betrayal, I decided to go whole hog. I gave him everything that I’d physically withheld in my prior relationships.

  At first, my heart wasn’t in the decision, and the fact that I wasn’t holding anything back scared me a bit. This anxiety begat paranoia. How could the man really love me and at the same time have pressured me to have sex when I felt so ambivalent about it? Was this my pattern: becoming infatuated with selfish men who would do me wrong? I dizzied myself with these thoughts, and gave of myself tentatively. Moreover, the sex was often disappointing.

  So it might sound delusional when I say that I considered our intimacy over the next few years to be redemptive. But finally confronting the ambiguity in my sex life allowed me to be more accepting of all my purported contradictions. And when the obsession with my sexual status fell away, my religious identity came into relief. I focused on maintaining the practices that are core to my spirituality and my connection to God.