“Love” is easily the most complicated word in the English language. No textbook definition or Google search could ever give the concept of “love” the slightest bit of justice. There are so many different versions of love, and what it truly means to love someone or something varies between literally every person on earth. This story is about how I came to feel what I consider romantic love for the very first time.

I grew up in an extremely religious home. I was homeschooled my entire upbringing until I went off to college to play baseball. Going to church four times a week, winning national Bible quizzes, and going on missions trips were central to my childhood. My views on girls at the time were shaped by my religious beliefs, and I thought I would lose my virginity to the girl I married, after which we’d both live a perfect, Christ-centered, life. Then, when I was an eleven-year-old kid with his nose buried between the pages of the Bible, a girl walked through the doors of my church and changed the landscape and trajectory of my life forever. It seems silly when I look back at it now, but when you’re that age, everything seems magnified. It was just supposed to be an eleven-year-old with his first-ever crush, but it’s a crush that shaped my view on love, that literally constructed it out of thin air.

Our two families couldn’t have been more at odds with one another. She had seven siblings and her family was not well off. My mother is the kind of person who will cut her arm off for someone else, so we started helping them out in all the varied ways my mother could devise. I never minded because it meant I could see this girl who I just knew would be mine forever. She was the one, my future wife. At eleven, I knew she was it for me. As the years went on, I eventually got up the courage to make it known to her how I felt.

Her parents didn’t believe in dating as most people see it. This was a common theme in the church I grew up in; young men were expected to ask their fathers to talk to the girls’ fathers and ask permission for their sons to “court” their daughters. Even attempting to explain this makes me laugh a little bit—the entire concept is hysterical—but back then it was a basic tenet of my life. As much as I was into this girl, I knew her dad would never grant my father permission for me to court her. I really did love her, and I wanted to have that perfect, Christ-centered life I’d envisioned. I wasn’t sure about the extent of my beliefs at this time, but I knew I wanted to be with her, and I wanted our love to last.

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I waited until we were both 18 to finally make a move. It was the summer before school started, and her parents were out of town. I was about to go to college, and she wanted to go to cosmetology school. My friend snuck out of his house and picked me up because I still didn’t have a license—my parents were extremely strict on me, too. He drove me to her house, and I’ll never forget how nervous I was. I’ve been in interrogation rooms with federal agents, been raided by the Drug Enforcement Administration, had 40 grand taken by Homeland Security, and I’ve still never been as nervous as I was on this night. She had no idea I was coming; I really wanted it to be a surprise. I threw rocks at her window the way they do it in the movies. She woke up, looked out her window, and quickly came outside. I still remember the way her face looked when she saw me standing there: lit up, alive, and so, so beautiful.

Her parents were gone, but her older brother hated me. He knew I loved his sister, and he was just an extension of her parents. I had brought a blanket, a CD player, and a poem I had written for her. I took her to a park by her house and set up the blanket and CD player. I’d made a mixtape CD of my favorite emo love songs by the likes of Dashboard Confessional and Brand New. I read her the poem that ended with me asking her to be my girlfriend. I remember the way her voice sounded when she breathed the word “yes,” and at that moment I had never been happier. My one dream, to have this beautiful girl by my side, had been realized.

The happiness was short-lived, however. We went back to her house to talk. My friend had stayed with her sister while the two of us were at the park, and the four of us were chilling in her room when her older brother literally broke down the door. He blasted into the room with his shoulder and started screaming at me and my friend to get out. I knew this would get back to her parents, that things were going to get out of hand. Sure, she was 18-years-old and legally an adult, but she’d also been so sheltered. I’m not saying I wasn’t sheltered, too, but I’d always had an outlet through sports. I had something other than the strict purity enforced by our religious ways of life.

Her father freaked out just as I had suspected he would. She was grounded for three months as her punishment for agreeing to be my girlfriend. She wasn’t allowed to leave the house without a parent accompanying her, she couldn’t even come to church because I would also be there. Her dad asked to meet with me after church the following Sunday, so I agreed to meet. That meeting profoundly impacted my life. The man took my father and I outside the side door at church. He was an odd man, not so much physically imposing but I was still afraid of what he would do. He was a little shorter than me but not much, around six feet tall and weighed about 200 pounds. He gave off a very creepy vibe and I had never liked him. He wore glasses and was nerdy and thought he was God himself. The premise of his argument was that God had given him final authority. He told me I needed to confess my sins to him and that I shouldn’t play sports on Sunday. At one point he even threatened my life, telling me he would do anything it took to protect his daughter, my dad stepped in at this point and let him know this crossed the line. He told me that I flat out wasn’t good enough for his daughter. Not good enough? At this point in my life, I was a great, God-fearing kid who was going off to college. I believed all the Bible stuff I had been taught growing up, and my desire was to be a good Christian man to his daughter. I told him she was 18 and could make her own decisions, but he responded that the Bible gave him authority over her, and the law of the land didn’t matter.

The whole church had his back, and she and I had no way to stay in contact. I was despondent, felt like I was reaching out into a void for a hand that could never reach back. We found ways around it occasionally, but neither of us had a cellphone. I’ve always thought that she could’ve bucked his authority, could’ve told her dad to go fuck himself, but that’s not the path she chose. Only now, years later, have I realized how truly fucked up her father really was.

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Fast forward a few months. As I was typing away on my laptop in college one evening, my best friend at the time sent me a message on AOL Instant Messenger. He’d sent me a link, and what I saw after I clicked through made my jaw drop to the floor. It was a picture of her father. A mugshot. A mugshot of her father on Maryland’s Sex Offender Registry. I pretty much lost it at that point. To call me “angry” wouldn’t justify my response. I thought about him telling me I wasn’t good enough for his daughter as I read his crime of “inappropriate touching of the genitals of a minor under the age of fifteen.”

It all made sense then—he had disappeared for a year when we were around fourteen years old. No one would talk about what had happened, but I knew it was something really weird. To know that the adults at my church stood by him, to know that they agreed that he should have the final say in who his daughter dated… I was devastated. The shock, the horror, the revulsion, the feeling of total and complete betrayal. You, who were supposed to uphold the teachings of Christ. You, who sheltered an abuser of children. That was the end of my believing what I was told growing up. That moment forever changed my way of thinking, of always deferring to the mysterious ways of God. No thanks. Now? I always think for myself, instead.

I’d wanted to save her. I knew this man—her father—was pure evil, but she stood with her family and chose them over our love. Her decision tore me apart for a long time, and I can honestly say she was still my baseline for the concept of romantic love for years afterward. I’d say by the time I turned 24, I wasn’t still in love with the girl of my eleven-year-old self’s dreams, but she was still my gold standard. She was the ruler by which I compared every single girl since. It wasn’t until fairly recently, when a girl from New York stole my heart, that I well and truly put my first crush to bed.

I think being young and feeling like I never really got a fair chance definitely fucked me up for life. For years I’ve always wondered what could have been if we’d only had a real shot. I never even had sex with the girl—the farthest we ever made it was me touching her breast while we were making out. And I’ve got to wonder if all of this is the reason why—if this story, the way it played out, the way it cuts me to the bone even now—my view of love is so fucked up.

I found out her father died of cancer. A pretty terrible bout of it, or so I hear. I hope that motherfucker died miserably. I’ll never give a fuck.