Lessons From the Kissing Booth

I once had a fling.
I know that, at 21, I should have had lots of flings. Flings should be my business. I should have spent the whole three years that I was in college having brief, intense interludes with exchange students and philosophy majors. I should have broken out my bikini and romped with surfers. It was in the plans; my party pickup line was supposed to be 'hello, my name is samantha, and my major is gratuitous recreational sex'. The trouble, sadly, is that eventually my personality gets in the way and so things never work out the way they do in the alternate universe of my other personality: the one in my head.
And so it was sort of refreshing to toss myself into a brand new environment and have a brief but truly fabulous rendez-vous. I behaved shamefully, but then that's how it's supposed to work in these situations. And the whole silly affair brought a deeper sense of understanding and comfort to a friendship that has been sporadic at best for many years.
It's not often, after all, that I get to (or want to) see my dearest male friends naked.

I get jealous of the women that my boyfriend has known in the past. Not merely in the biblical sense, but even just friends. The thought that he's desired other women makes me shiver. I disregard these feelings, though, because they're silly. I refuse to let them get to me, to let them get anywhere near him, to let them outside my head. I've never been insecure like this before and so I'll be damned if I start now. And I've discovered that the easiest way to counteract this effect is to remind myself that I have my own past which (hopefully) has the same effect on him. I remind myself that I've known men (in the biblical sense) before myself.
In some odd, rather perverse way, this helps to chase off my demons.