It continually amazes me how much substantitve change can occur in such a short time for teens and twenty-somethings.

So ChoosingPancakes asked me to see my OKCupid profile sometime last week. I'd told her a while ago that she could look at it, so I opened it up to send her the link and she sent me hers. I was comparing some of our answers to various questions (we're a pretty good match, heh) out of curiosity when I stumbled upon an answer to some question about sex that actually made me laugh out loud. An answer to another question which had become completely false contained the explanation "I don't to casual sex..." and I almost fell out on the floor, I was laughing so hard. I then searched my OkCupid profile for every question I had ever answered about sex so that I could throw all of it out and accurately represent myself. Today I finally got the personality-meter to say I'm ever-so-slightly sex-driven, and that made me smile.

...But it's not like those questions were from a particularly long time ago. I just made that account towards the end of last summer, as part of my breakup-recovery process. (Talked to a few guys, was reminded of my desirability by men who aren't my ex, didn't actually meet any of the guys I talked to, but felt like my mission had nonetheless been accomplished.) The oldest those questions could be is from 9 months ago.


...And yet, I'd guess that less than 30% of them were still accurate. It seems that nearly the entirety of my opinions about sex and sexual relationships has changed over the course of this academic year. Granted, the casual sex I've had this year ranged from somewhat awkward (but still pleasurable) to mind-blowing chronologically. But I actually don't think that's at the root of my changed opinions. Maybe it's less due to substantive change and more due to me no longer giving a fuck about who and how and why I fuck about self-repression for the sake of decorum or societal pressure or respectability or whatever. Maybe it's less that I stopped wanting to be a good girl and more that I realized I'd never really wanted to be overwhelmingly good in the first place, and that I didn't particularly like being perceived of in that manner. On an even more basic level, though, I think I always knew that I wanted my first time to be "special," but that after that, I was probably going to be open to a bit more adventure and sexual exploration.

I wonder how my experiences (hopefully) exploring this magical thing between hookups and relationships called "dating" might prompt changes in the responses again. I'm sure I have friends who would say this is just one more example of why you can never trust my opinions on anything because they'll change in a year. I will concede that my opinions about things change a lot, but that doesn't mean I'm fickle or that I wasn't being honest or trustworthy when we discussed my opinion the first time--it means that I am the amalgamation of my lived experiences and this funny things happen, when those grow and expand, so do I.