With the exception of a misguided attempt at first love with a man that I am sure at least one culture in human civilization would describe as a relative, I’ve never dated a man that I haven’t first met online. Naively, I relayed this fact of my life to a friend of mine who is also a stand-up comic. And he did the only thing a comedian could do in a moment like that: he laughed. Hard.

Seeing my dating history through his eyes, I realized how funny and strange it was, too. If it hadn’t been for the invention of the Internet, I may have never gotten my first kiss. Because before the Yenta-like assistance of modern technology the primary way I had ever let a man know that I liked him was by never making eye contact and pretending he didn’t exist. My other strategy was to make awkward declarations of unrequited love–sometimes with poetry–and always with unfortunate outcomes. (If only I could convert all the energy I’ve ever spent on unrequited love, I would be able to provide power to millions of homes and become a saint of renewable energy. So to all the men I’ve placed in that awkward situation: I’m really sorry about that, fellas.)

But then something wonderful happened: the Internet was born and suddenly I could hope to meet men without needing to establish eye contact first. So in 2001, I was on-line dating at a time when people still thought that the only people who dated on-line were social misfits and murderers and they were kind of right.

Being in the first category, I was a twenty-three year old woman seeking my first kiss. And by the time I began to earnestly seek out the tempting possibility of “lip cookie,” a first kiss had come to mean too much to me. I should have gotten my first kiss when I was thirteen at summer camp. Or fifteen during a game of Spin the Bottle. Or seventeen at prom. But I never dated in high school or college. The nearly complete lack of male interest in my life left me feeling a little sexually confused. Homophobia internalized itself and manifested in a deeply-seeded belief that a woman was a lesbian if men didn’t want her. In fact, for a time, I wondered if I was a “secret lesbian.” Not that I was secretly hiding the fact from others. But that I was hiding the fact from myself. I mean, I liked Melissa Etheridge and played a mean game of basketball. And the boys never seemed to like me like that. Maybe they knew something I didn’t.

Once, after practicing with the JV Boys’ team when their coach invited me to work out with them, the guys started stripping off their sweaty T-shirts. At that very moment, a couple of cheerleaders bouncy-walked into the gym. Simultaneously, all the boys screamed “Girls!” and ran into the locker room. Left alone humiliated, standing at the top of the key, I watched all of them disappear without one of them looking back and realizing, oh God, Heather has boobs, too!

So yeah, that first kiss took its sweet time finding me.

But undeterred by my absolute dearth of dating experience in high school, my parents were convinced I would start dating once I went to college. They even bought me special “dating outfits” for my freshman year that, in the end, I was forced to convert into church clothes when it was clear I wouldn’t be breaking my non-dating streak anytime soon. God bless my parents for their good intentions and Pollyanna faith in their daughter. But their fashion sensibilities were never going to help me get a date. Unless it was with Jesus. Because nothing says you are never going to make out with a cute guy like a nice pantsuit with attached vest.

Although as I write this history of my romantic life pre-Internet, I need to also remember that I was occasionally presented with opportunities for romantic experience during my life. I just didn’t know what to do with them.

At summer camp one year, when I was eleven or twelve, I was walking down the hill to our cabin with a group of counselors and other campers after Friday night vespers. It was dark. And a blonde-haired boy who I had only talked to a couple of times that week began to walk with me down the hill.

I don’t remember what we talked about, if we talked about anything at all.

What I do remember is that at one point he asked if I was cold.

I said I wasn’t. Because, well, I wasn’t.

But apparently needing to stay with the script he had worked out in his mind, he put his arm around me with the gracefulness of laying a 2×4 across my shoulders.

Now, during times of crisis, my emotional response tends to go on seven-second delay. Although sometimes the delay can be anywhere between seven minutes and seven hours. Whether this trait is learned or inherited, I do not know. But remaining calm in a crisis does tend to be an Isaacs’ family trait.

The year before, my dad and I had been driving his old Saab sports car home from the auto paint shop where it had been newly restored to a fresh, cherry red. All the way home from the shop, for about fifteen miles, we had been smelling gas. My mom and little brother were driving behind us in our family’s Dodge Caravan. But just as my dad turned the Saab onto our quiet dead-end street, the car burst into flames. From the vantage point of my mom and brother, it appeared that my father and I were completely engulfed in the fire. In that moment of utter terror, believing we might already be dead, my mother shielded my brother’s eyes.

Inside the car, however, things were more peaceful. I was reading one of my library books. Two or three others were sitting on the dashboard.

But my father, a former forestry firefighter and highway patrol officer, said to me in a very calm, firm tone: “Heather, the car is on fire. I need you to unbuckle your seat belt and jump out of the car.”

I looked up to see the outside of the windshield covered in flames. The fire didn’t seem real. The whole moment felt like a dream. Yet, the fire had very realistically burned through the brakelines so my father couldn’t stop the car. Luckily, by the time we turned onto our quiet residential street, the car was only traveling 20 mph or so.

I fumbled with my buckle for a second until it unclicked. Then I opened the car door. Of course, I did as I only thought was right. I threw my library books out first to avoid any fines.

I didn’t clear the car as far as I had thrown my books, however. And the car ended up rolling over my back legs. I wasn’t hurt. Only left in a bit of shock. The firefighters still cut my pant legs open though and took me to the ER to be more thoroughly examined. My brand new jeans, I thought, as I laid on a neighbor’s front porch. But weirdly, it felt good to get so much attention.

In the end, I was well enough to go to school the next day. Excited to get extra sympathy points, too, I began telling everyone I’d been rolled over by a car on fire the night before. Except no one believed me.

Now, I am aware that there is nothing objectively similar about a car fire and a boy putting his arm around you at summer camp. But on that night walking down the hill from vespers, I really couldn’t tell the difference.

My father might as well have been at my side saying in that calm policeman voice: “Heather, there is an arm around your shoulder. Do not panic. But I need you to jump off the hill.”

I became very quiet as I tried to grasp what was happening. Especially as the boy began to declare openly that we were now boyfriend and girlfriend. Of course, I could have said no. But I decided against taking a more public, potentially more embarrassing move away from him. Internally, I reasoned that as it was Friday night and camp was over on Sunday morning that I would only need to tolerate this situation for one more day. And then I would never see him again.

If you are or have been a Seventh-day Adventist, you might be shaking your head right now in response to that statement as you know the reality I was facing better than I did. Because in the small world of Seventh-day Adventism in which everyone is connected by no more than two or three degrees of separation, you can never  count on never seeing someone again. Because even if you never meet someone again on this earth, there’s always Heaven to contend with.

I went home that Sunday believing I was in the clear. But a month later my family attended the large yearly gathering of thousands of Seventh-day Adventists at our region’s campmeeting outside the cool Central California coastal town of Santa Cruz. I didn’t know it then. But I was screwed.

Even though the thought briefly crossed my mind that I might run into the blond-haired boy again, I wasn’t worried. In the month since I had last seen him, I had gotten my own long hair cut short into a bob. And in my mind, I looked totally different. Unrecognizable to the world! Like a spy, I believed I could move through crowds undetected because my hair was now an incredible four inches shorter.

I should have known I’d been made the moment I stepped into the large youth tent, dark and crowded with a couple hundred pre-teens, and a silhouetted male figure began to cheerfully wave at me from the far side of the entrance. Instead, I turned on my heel and scurried out of the tent as fast as I could, hoping beyond hope that he hadn’t seen me.

But while speed-walking away from the youth tent, I began to hear the blonde-haired boy calling my name. I didn’t turn around. He kept calling and a moment later caught up to me.

And in the annals of my life, what happened next could be described as one of those moments that both defy rational explanation and explain so much of who I am.

When you double down on a mistake after it’s clear you’ve been outed, you enter into the world of delusion. How I believed the best thing to do in that situation was not to simply talk to this boy but rather to make up an entirely different identity for myself–to pretend that I wasn’t Heather but a different girl all together–I cannot fully understand. And not only did I pretend to be a different girl, I pretended to be from a different country as well.

In the melodic up and down rhythm of a fake Swedish accent, I said: “No, my name is Anna.” He looked at me quizzically. And bless his heart, he asked me if I had a twin sister.

All I could say–as though I couldn’t speak English except for those five words–was, “No, my name is Anna.” Then he looked at me like I was crazy–a look I entirely deserved–and then walked away.

Never having been a boy myself, I cannot fully appreciate the cultural demands placed on young men to initiate romantic contact. However, it is not hard for me to imagine how, in all the worst case scenarios a young man might courageously prepare himself for as he anticipates manifold possibilities for rejection, the idea that the object of your heart’s desire could pretend to be somebody else from another country just to avoid talking to you could could rank up there as one of the most awful.

I hope he wasn’t scarred. At least, not much. He was really a very nice, cute boy. And I treated him like a rattlesnake. I am truly sorry about that. If it makes anyone feel better, I continued to be a tremendously shy, awkward, and religious little girl with the capacity to socially isolate herself for no good reason for a long time afterwards.

But with the invention of the Internet, I began to venture out of my cave of self-doubt and explore the possibility that there might be, in this world of billions of people, another oddball or two in the general vicinity of where I was living, who might like to have coffee with me or something.

Naive to sex and the world-at-large through my early twenties, I made a number of missteps, however. One of the more notable incidents involved an unfortunate sex chat experiment.

You see, as a teenager, I read Harlequin romance novels on the sly. Often, I would read them right there in the library stacks as I didn’t want to chance being seen with them at home. I would speed-read all the dialogue and plot but savor the sex scenes. My heart would beat faster and I would feel warm and flushed. And that’s about it. I didn’t do anything about. Because I was twenty-one before I actually learned how to masturbate.

And then I had to learn from a book. It wasn’t even a book on sex. It was a book on writing.

My apologies to Natalie Goldberg who wrote in her lovely book Writing Down the Bones: “Writing is like masturbating. You just keep moving your hand.” But I give my thanks to her, too, because when I read those words my entire sexual world was changed forever. I realized I’d been doing it all wrong! I’d been treating my clitoris like a microwave. As though I could just push one button to cook a whole potato. Boop. Boop. Boop. So when nothing happened, I just figured my microwave was broken. Boop.

For a large part of my youth, I didn’t understand the mechanics of masturbation. So it should make sense then how I would completely miss the purpose of sex chatting. In my mind, I was co-writing sexy Harlequin love-making scenes with a stranger somewhere in the world with the sole purpose of feeling all tingly and warm like I had while reading those books when I was a teenager. That was it. So I didn’t understand what happened one night when all of a sudden, in the midst of one of these joint writing projects, my screen suddenly filled with:

OGSHGAHH YTDHCJ HHFGHHGFHSDFBQ#$TH%E^YYHHHQ!!!!@

Later, I would learn this is shorthand for ejaculation.

In this way, the Internet became my somewhat inappropriate sex ed teacher. And I had a lot to learn as none of the nitty-gritty details about sex were ever talked about in my church or family.

In time, with the help of the Internet, I received one of the grittier lessons in my life on dating and sex. It came in the form of my first kiss.

I met him through an online dating website. We exchanged a few emails and maybe a phone call or two. And then we decided to meet up at a Starbucks halfway between where I lived in Sacramento and he lived in the Silicon Valley. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that I wasn’t going to find a romantic connection here. In one of the perplexing truths of online dating, the chemistry you might feel with someone in the world of words might not translate into the world of bodies. Our conversation seemed stilted. And physically, I didn’t feel any warmth or connection with him.

He also drove a luxury sports car which just kind of turned me off as I’ve never been comfortable with overt displays of wealth. None of these facts kept me from getting in his luxury sports car, however, when he offered to take us for a drive.

Yeah, things just get worse from here.

Word to the wise: Never get into a car with a strange man on the first date. Especially if the following thought crosses your mind: “Yeah, he’s smaller than me. I think I could take him in a fight.”

Another word to the wise: If the man in question happens to drive you to a strangely quiet location next to an oil refinery, it’s probably not best to explain to him right then that you don’t really see the two of you going on another date.

I tend to learn things the hard way.

Thank God, he agreed to drive me back to my car. But it quickly became the longest drive of my life. Becoming increasingly upset at the news that I wouldn’t be seeing him again, he began to drive erratically. On the freeway, he did things like accelerate to 80mph, close in on a slower car ahead of us, then slam on the brakes before crashing into it from behind. He took the hairpin turn of a freeway on-ramp at a dangerously high speed. Despite the car being designed for tight maneuvering, I felt a sickening weightless sensation as the inside wheels seemed to break firm contact with the asphalt.

I felt myself get very quiet inside. And instead of outwardly panicking at the fact that the car was basically on fire and that this time I couldn’t jump out, I reached out to him and began to stroke the back of his neck and talk soothingly to him. I’ve learned since then that my response that night was a tend-and-befriend reaction to stress that women often utilize instead of the more characteristically male flight or fight response. All I knew at the time though was that I just wanted him to calm the fuck down.

When we finally returned to the Starbucks parking lot, I felt like Sandra Bullock in the last scene of “Gravity.” But the nightmare wasn’t over yet. Turning off the ignition, he took the keys and motioned me to take them. He said that if I didn’t take the keys that he was going to drive home and kill himself.

I refused to take the keys. I leaned in and kissed him instead.

He was ready for me. And I still hold the memory of his dry, open, sucker-fish mouth headed for mine. And the realization that this was it. This was the thing I’d been waiting for all these years. Though I felt violated doing it–thereby stripping the moment of any beauty–it was technically my first kiss.

I made it home that night. But I didn’t tell my parents what happened. They were already worried about this thing called Internet dating and I didn’t want to give them real cause for concern. And I was ashamed that any of it had even happened. The next day, the guy with the sports car sent me an email detailing all the things he would have liked to have done to me on our date. I didn’t respond. And I never heard from him again. For this, I was grateful.

For a time, I was done with online dating all together. But because of that whole problem of not being able to look at man in the eye in the real world, I was eventually drawn back to the virtual world for the possibility of an occasional coffee date or dinner with a complete stranger. Mostly, I never went on more than one or two dates with a man. Until I met the man who eventually became my husband for nearly five years.

Now that I am single again, I am trying my hand at online dating once more. The results have been mostly positive as it seems like there are a lot of really good guys in the world. But occasionally, I get awesomely creepy messages that remind me that I should never get in a car with a strange man on a first date.

My favorite creepy message of all time is this one from a man who said he lived in Indiana: “I wish i could see into ur eyes and know what u want I wish i could be d one 2 make u happy through out ur life time I wish i could fix my cell in ur blood 2 make u feel how much interest i have 4 u I wish i could be with u and show u the love i have 4 u through out ur life time beta.” How terribly, creepy awesome is that?

And this past fall, I had to take another break from online dating after receiving one too many weird messages that left me wanting to enter the monastic life. It’s amazing what people will say to you online that they would never dare say to you on the street. A 75-year-old man who lives in my small town promised to make up for our age difference by giving me multiple orgasms. That was the last straw for me. Or the beginning of something really uncomfortable for everyone.

I only hope we never run into each other at the grocery store. Or, God forbid, that I one day become his hospice chaplain.

Without the help of the Internet, I may have never gotten my first kiss. And as things turned out the way they did, maybe that wouldn’t have been a bad thing.

Because even with the assistance of online dating, certain things I haven’t quite figured out yet. I still struggle with eye contact with men I find attractive. I still feel like running away when a guy waves in my direction. I am always on the verge of declaring that my name is, in fact, Anna.

And online dating seems to breed unhealthy habits of mine, too. Everything seems to move faster with online dating. Reading through hundreds of profiles on OkCupid, I’ve learned how common it is now for sex to happen by the first or second date. Even though I always thought it would be lovely to meet someone and become friends slowly over time before moving into a more intimate relationship, I’ve never let myself have that experience before now. Though I’ve had several first kisses since that awful night–each one of them heaven by comparison–every single first kiss and, to be honest, first sex happened before the third date, before I could really be known, before I could really know the man I was reaching for. Moving quickly has been a cover for all the insecurity I have felt that if you really get to know me that you won’t want to be with me after all. Sealing the moment with a kiss has been a way for my mind to find evidence that I am not, in fact, as ugly as I have felt for much of my life.

Recently, I added a new item to my bucket list. Before I die, I would like the experience of knowing what it is like to love and be loved from the inside out rather than trying to locate the door in from the outside. In this way, I feel like I am twelve again. I feel like I have never been kissed. And in an important way, I haven’t been. So when I think about the prospect now, I’m terrified. Truly, I have viscerally experienced less fear when my life was in actual danger–whether in a car on fire or in a car driven by a crazy man–than when I am standing at the edge of opening my heart to the wild possibility that I could be loved for simply being who I am, to finally get that first kiss I’ve been waiting for.