After the recent death of the great Leonard Cohen, I binge-listened to his songs for about a week. Music, like scents, can bring up a lot of memories. I came to know Mr. Cohen’s music when I was about 17, and many of his songs resonated well with my teenage anxieties about love and intimacy. When I think about my early attempts at relationships it never fails to amaze me how I ended up with the lovely life I’m living now. It didn’t start out promising.

I had just turned 16 and one of my best friends was organising a trip to Poland, where her grandma lived. My entire gang of nerdy kids was going. Said friend’s dad was going to drive us there in a van, we would stay in the grandma’s basement, and do all kinds of cultural things. The boy I had a crush on was going, and I had high hopes that maybe when darkness descended on that basement room, we would hold each other’s pinky fingers and stroke each other’s palms in secret. The chances of this happening were slim, since the boy I had a crush on had a crush on another girl, who was also going. But one can always dream.

My parents had a great approach to dealing with romance and sexuality while raising us. They believed that quality information cannot hurt, so I knew all about how they met, how my mom lost her virginity, how contraception worked, what STIs were and how to prevent them. I knew all this by about age 8: my curiosity was always met with open discussions. That is, as long as my curiosity was sufficiently abstract. At the first hint of the possibility that I might soon engage in these activities in practice, my mother panicked. As it turned out, she had some rather Victorian ideas about at what age and stage of life it was appropriate for a young lady to do these things, and it involved being married or at the very least committed to the partner for life.

Clearly, that was not the case with some high school crush, so my mom had vivid nightmares of what might go down in my friend’s grandma’s basement. If my fantasies of pinky-holding were far fetched, these nightmares were downright absurd, but nonetheless my mom decided that I was not going. She told me she didn’t have the money to fund my trip. I threw a tantrum, but within a week I worked out a plan to pick up extra tutoring hours and fund it myself. When I told her this, I found out that I wasn’t allowed to go anyway. This was the cruelest twist of fate, a violent crushing of my dreams; I was heartbroken and furious. I fought with my mom bitterly for a month. To this day my friends often bring up their memories from that trip: all of them went, and I still get a little bit angry at my mother for not letting me be a part of it.

A few weeks later I participated in a two-week preparation camp and competition for getting on the team for the International Chemistry Olympiad. One of our teachers, seven years my senior -I’ll call him Percival- asked me out on a date. Flattered, I accepted. He asked if I would go on a week-long canoeing trip with him and his university friends: a bunch of guys I had never met. I presented this proposal to my mom, and, being utterly worn down by our epic battle over the previous months, she said yes.

Percival’s friends called me ‘the flower’ and ‘the lily’, as in “Hi, I’m Blue.” “Ah, you are the flower!” They sometimes teased Percival about whether he was still celibate. Had I had some self-respect, this may have raised red flags, but as it was, all that registered in my brain was ‘MALE ATTENTION!’. I wonder how you teach kids self-respect… I’m afraid the only way is to trust and respect them, which would sometimes go against one’s instinct to protect them. In my mom’s case, her instinct to protect us was always the strongest force. (This is not to say that Percival’s friends were not kind to me, in fact many of them came to genuinely like me, I think.)

Percival and I were a glaring mismatch. We had precisely zero things in common. He was from an old family of nobility, of which he was very proud. He was traditional, right wing, patriarchal. I was firmly rooted in the proletariat, and, to the extent that one has a world view at 16, I was an emancipated, liberal socialist. His views on men and women outraged me; he saw my dissent as the rebellion of an unruly child who needed to be tamed. We weren’t even equally hormonal, I mostly would have been happy just to hold pinky fingers. He loved me, I think, in his own way, but it wasn’t a kind of love that did me much good.

The canoe trip was fun, though. I met one of Percival’s friends there, I’ll call him Flint. Flint and I had instant chemistry. We sat on the riverbank, several meters apart, smiling at each other. If I thought this was subtle, Percival did not, and one morning he collapsed Flint’s tent on top of him. “Percival, you motherf***er!”- cried Flint.

Nonetheless, Percival and I soldiered on for another half year or so. He hated my parents, and my parents despised him. My mom started insisting on an 8pm curfew and made a huge fuss if I ever missed it. I got up at 5am on Saturday to go to Percival’s dorm in the morning so it would look like I had spent the night there. In turn, Percival would occasionally be allowed to sleep over but my mom would throw him out before dawn lest the neighbours notice his presence. Eventually, my whole life was reduced to rebelling against Percival and defending my parents when I was with him, and rebelling against my parents and defending Percival when I was with them. It was exhausting and unproductive: my mother and my boyfriend waging a drawn out war over my virginity, only agreeing on the part that I did not deserve a say in the matter. Finally, mercifully, he broke up with me. I felt relieved.

Within two weeks, I was dating Flint, much to Percival’s disdain. I fell for Flint hard, and I wasn’t going to let my parents come between us. I instructed Flint to act as if not only he had no interest in naughty pursuits, he wasn’t even aware of their existence. When he asked me to go on a camping trip with him, just the two of us, I told my parents that I was going with a group of ten people. Flint liked me, and perhaps cared for me, but didn’t take me too seriously. In retrospect I can’t blame him: I was five years younger, I had blatantly flirted with him while still dating his friend, I talked incessantly about the boys I was hanging out with at school. I probably didn’t inspire much confidence. Oddly, aside from the dizzy feeling of being in love, I remember very little about Flint. We must have talked, but I can’t recall what about. He had a much younger little sister whom I met once, she was sweet. I remember our camping trip, cuddling up to him in the tent and feeling amazing, high on love and freedom.

After a few giddy months of infatuation, Flint headed off to the US for a year through an exchange program. I wanted to wait for him, write long poems about my plight with hot tears streaming down my face. He told me that was not a good idea. We parted on a somewhat ambiguous note, the breakup not clean enough to completely sink in. One of the last times he came over, he brought a Leonard Cohen cassette tape (yes, I am that old). After he left, I listened to it over and over until my sister, with whom I shared a room, probably wanted to kill herself. I thought the words carried secret messages meant just for me:

Oh, let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We’re both of us beneath our love, we’re both of us above
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love

Clearly, once he was back the next year, we would come together in a passionate embrace, marry and have lots of babies, right? Eventually reality did set in, but the music did not get any less appealing. The songs of the tape fit just as well the following year, and the one after that, as I tried and failed a few more times to love well.

Stories of why you love Leonard Cohen and/or stories of awkward young love are most welcome in the comments!