"Did you know you can break your boner?"
I felt sick the moment the question slipped out of my mouth. It was a Friday night, fall of my junior year in high school. I was with my new adorable boyfriend, whom I had secretly had a crush on for a year.
Needless to say, I killed the mood. No. I beat, raped and murdered it.
It could have been perfect. He walked me home every day for two weeks. I had waited long enough to make sure he wasn't that guy my father had been warning me about since the age of seven who was going to deflower me just by looking in my general direction, have sex with me a jillion times, and then throw me outside by the dumpster utterly unclad.
Somewhere between getting busy and my mind wandering off to the Cosmopolitan article on sex disasters I had read earlier that day, I'd uttered the most awkward question I could manage. What made it worse was that it wasn't even true.
Technically, a penis cannot be broken because it is not a limb, nor does it have bones. It's a muscle. In retrospect, I should have asked, Did you know you can strain your boner? Then I wouldn't have spent 15 more minutes explaining to him that his weewee is a muscle and can't break.
To be honest, at the time, the idea of an erect fleshy object pointing at me made me want to call it a night and just watch reruns of Dawson's Creek in my room.
Two years later, I am no longer plagued with nightmares of decrepit erections. Unfortunately I have learned that these awkward moments don't disappear just because you're no longer in high school and "down there" is no longer the common phrase to describe your private area.
We all know the cliche of that woman who squealed "I love you!" during sex with a guy she's only been seeing for three weeks. Not to mention "that guy" (yes, that one) that called his post-Fall Ball hook-up Sharon when her name was Anita. Then there was this guy who took my friend to dinner and decided to tell the unappetizing story of how he pooped in the tub as a child while they waited for dessert.
Just because you now have an idea of what type of person you want to be does not guarantee that your love life will not have moments that could compete for the sex disasters features of Cosmopolitan. So how do we move on? If there was a 12-step program for people who wish they could take back what they said last night, I'd be happy to give you the website.
We have a whole word in the dictionary to describe the excruciating silence that lingers after you've dropped the bomb. If it hasn't happened to you yet, well, I just don't believe you. Looking on the bright side, we should just learn to embrace our awkwardness. The people who actually submit to the Cosmo sex disasters have. Plus, our awkward moments will help each other to feel better about ourselves.
On a serious note, looking back, I can only laugh. As much as we all love Dawson's Creek, it's the broken penis story that my friends are still laughing about. If we all got over being uncomfortable with our "down there," then laughing at ourselves shouldn't be that hard.
The next time you find yourself saying something awkward in the heat of the moment, just laugh it off. Or you can inform your partner that penises can't actually be broken. What the hell, bring on the awkwardness.
