My first love convinced me to drink bleach.
I was 20, a junior at Brigham Young University in Utah, and already behind by Mormon standards when it came to love and dating. I wasn’t old enough to rent a car or order a drink, yet most of my classmates were dating, engaged or married. We had a children’s playroom in our university library. Classmates brought babies to lectures. It was not a question of if, but when, I would be wed.
Mormon doctrine teaches its followers to marry young, stay sexually abstinent before marriage and have as many children as possible. This is already a tightrope to walk, but I took it even more literally with my then-untreated scrupulosity, a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder characterized by a relentless thought cycle of fear and doubt surrounding morality and religion.
I was consumed by anxiety around everything church related, constantly fearing I had committed a sin I couldn’t remember and that I was unworthy of the blessings my high-demand religion promised. Yet I had never been in any rush to get married before I was inundated with church culture at BYU and felt pressured to check all the boxes.
As a freshman, I had met with my bishop to confess my failures. “All five of my roommates have already gone on dates,” I said. “Also, I haven’t told anyone this, but I’m worried I might be into women.”
“Well, you haven’t acted on those impulses, have you?” he said. “It’s fine to be a lesbian as long as you don’t act on it. You know, I think I understand lesbians, because I, too, am attracted to women.”
His spiritually sanctioned advice was: “Go flirt with boys!”
For two years, I tried. A recently returned missionary took me swing dancing. A too-forward man held my hand, without asking! And a former cop bought me a $50 steak and showed me his gun collection.
I had just about given up on dating when my neighbor, a fellow student, asked me out. I tallied his qualifications as we walked to a bowling alley. He was exactly my height, but his fluffy blond hair made him seem a few inches taller. He laughed endearingly.
I wanted to be a good Mormon girl, to date and marry the way I was supposed to. This man felt safe, so we kept going out. We were each other’s first kiss, at 20 (me) and 22 (him).
“I’ve been waiting to have my first kiss with someone really special,” he said. “I think it’s you.”
Which sounded sweet, but also just seems like something any sexually repressed Mormon would say. And we were two sexually repressed Mormons.
We spent most of our 11 months of dating cooking together in my half-lit apartment kitchen, doing homework on his dingy couch and ignoring how bad we were at kissing. He got me into rock climbing, having no idea he was introducing me to the gayest hobby possible that I would later take up with my future girlfriend.
There were sweet family dinners at his childhood home, a weekend road trip to my Southern Nevada hometown for hiking and camping, and game nights with his high school friends.
I made the mistake of asking my mother what she thought of him after bringing him home like a fish I’d caught, as if to say, “Look! Aren’t you proud?” But she said he was nerdy, and I then made the mistake of telling him that, which went as well as you might expect.
Every time I found myself attracted to a woman, I went to my boyfriend’s apartment to confess. To his credit, he always laughed and said, “You’re probably bisexual,” which felt incredibly progressive. But being a good Mormon meant ignoring that part of me.
I loved that neither of us had any clue what we were doing.
Sure, he convinced me he knew more. He was two years older, and the church’s patriarchal structure convinced me he was the decision maker. He told me not to be clingy, scolded me when I was too prideful. He reminded me that his future wife wouldn’t be someone who struggled with self-harm or lost her temper the way I did.
I felt ashamed. I didn’t trust myself enough to argue. I cried and said I would do better. I grew up being taught that “enduring to the end” was part of being a good Mormon. I believed this meant not only staying true to my religion but also to my first boyfriend. After all, if I could endure dating him, I would never have to kiss another man.
A few months in, he admitted he had never meant to ask me out, but I’d gotten the wrong idea when he asked me to go bowling, and then we just kept hanging out.
Somehow, this revelation didn’t convince either of us to end the relationship.
It wasn’t hard to stay pure. I wanted to cuddle on the couch and go car-camping in the canyons and hike holding hands in the soft morning fog. In the Mormon Church, sexual sin is taught as being almost as bad as murder. My only relief was convincing myself I was more righteous for having no desire to be intimate with a man. I didn’t want his rough hands on my body. I wanted to say no.
But as we lay in the back of my car, he asked for more than I wanted to give. I said, “No, I’m not ready,” and then my voice shook, and I said, “It’s OK.”
His hands on my body. My hands on his.
I remembered what they said at church about women being responsible for maintaining their virtue, for keeping men from temptation, and a sick feeling grew in my stomach.
I drove us home. He said nothing while I hunched over the wheel and sobbed. In a few months, I sold that car, even though I loved it, because every time I looked in the back seat I remembered that I was no longer clean.
As a child, my O.C.D. convinced me the only way to be morally clean was to be physically clean. I drank drops of hand sanitizer in elementary school whenever I didn’t pray the right amount and then wondered why I got stomachaches. As a teenager, I was so ashamed of my first crush on a girl that I washed my hands until they cracked and bled. With no good bacteria left to fight against disease, warts broke out across the backs of my hands. I lived in shame, warts all over my knuckles, and I still couldn’t stop scrubbing them, convinced I would never be clean.
Then I was 20, and I no longer drank drops of hand sanitizer, and I washed my hands a normal amount. But because of what happened in that back seat, I was now dirty again and needed a new salve. I could scrub myself raw in the shower, take medication for the urinary tract infection I got from his hands on my body and pray until my voice grew hoarse, but nothing could fix what I’d done.
So I started obsessing about drinking bleach. Not because I wanted to die — I knew even a small amount of bleach could be fatal, and I would never actually choose to drink it — but because I felt so repulsed by our actions.
I joked about it with my boyfriend. I couldn’t talk about what happened between us, so I joked about drinking bleach.
Then one day he took me to his kitchen and said, “Maybe this will get you to stop talking about it.”
We stood barefoot, afternoon sun streaming in. He held a bottle of bleach in one hand and poured me a capful. Probably a tablespoon. I smelled it before he lifted it to my mouth, sharp and bright.
I didn’t question it. He was just helping me face my fears. Right?
I looked in his eyes and nodded because I thought I loved him. I loved someone who brought poison to my lips and called it a cure. I tipped the liquid back like a shot. Like salty, rancid almond milk. Cold and quick. I wanted to gasp. I swallowed instead. I waited for it to burn, but I felt nothing but nausea.
I wouldn’t tell anyone about this for years, not because I thought he was wrong but because I thought he was right. After all, I did stop talking about bleach after that.
A few weeks later, he came to my apartment to tell me God told him it was time for us to break up. “Your family will never come around to liking me,” he said. “I don’t want to live like that.”
“Anyway,” he said with a laugh, “at least now you know you like men.”
Gabrielle Shiozawa is a writer in Walnut Creek, Calif.
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