When I was seven, I learned to long.

I have begun taking my wife further into my confidences than ever before, in quite conversations under the covers in in bed, in the early morning and late at night. I have confided my attraction to a male friend, my childhood desire for intimacy with my childhood peers, which remained unsatisfied . . . my mortal inhibition that I experience even into the present.

I have explained to her precisely how, in my childhood, I became literally frightfully inhibited with both boys and girls, unable to express myself with either and engaging in hidden consort with the family's dogs and cats. My shame was immense. My every avenue for natural expression seemed blocked, as by tanks position in the streets to stop the advance of a nascent demonstration.

When I was in second grade, my best two friends were Adam and Holly, who were brother and sister. A year before, the Black Panther Party had left a Volkswagen van in our driveway, and Adam, Holly and we "traveled" cross-country in the the Volkswagen van. Holly was "mother"; I, the "father"; and Adam was our child. When not driving somewhere, Holly and I kissed, embraced and fondled lovingly. When our "child" misbehaved, I "put him over me knee" and lovingly patted his bottom. These were the best moments of playing house. We played house on weekdays after school and on Saturdays and Sundays as well.

When we "arrived home", Holly and I went into the garage in my yard, took off each others clothes and made love, as much as a seven year old is physically able to make love. In these ways, felt my first erections. We lived an idyllic life in our Volkswagen van and in my garage, but our felicity didn't last long.

Adam and Holly's house and mine had adjoining backyards, so my driveway was visible from their back door. One sunny spring afternoon, on a Friday after school, when Adam, Holly and I had just arrived from a trip in the Volkswagen van, had made love in the garage and were coming out, adjusting our clothes, Cindy (Holly's older and disciplinarian sister) saw us emerge from the garage in a state of "just afterness." She screamed to Adam and Holly to "come home right now" and then I did not see them again for the rest of the weekend.

I strongly suspected what had happened next. Adam and Holly's mother, a strict corporal disciplinarian, had beaten them both - on their bare bottoms - and strictly told them never, ever, to go over to that garage again, never to engage in that behavior, and to have nothing to do with that boy next door.

Just as I suspected, when I saw Adam and Holly after school the following Monday, and invited them to play house as we always had, Adam whispered to me that his mother had forbidden them to, and that was, effectively, the end of my intimacy with Adam and Holly. I was seven and Holly was a year or so younger than I, but in the eyes of my friend's parents (and perhaps even Adam and Holly), I had become a dirty, dangerous pedophile. Holly, Adam and I were obliged to forget what had existed between us, and never to attempt to reconstruct it. We couldn't even talk to one another.

I noticed during that period that all love on the television soap operas "One Life to Live" and "All My Children" was unrequited, unconsummated, longing love, and not the kind of love that Adam and Holly and I shared in the garage. Soap operas, and perhaps life itself, I though, were about longing for love and being too inhibited, afraid, or troubled to realize one's desires. I certainly was learning to live as if in one of those soap operas.

As I told my wife, this morning, I subsequently felt too afraid to be with girls, and too afraid to express erotic passion for boys. So, I began to stay in the house and avoid all interaction with children entirely. All of life was longing, until I forgot that I was longing at all.

Today, my wife accepts my increasing self-awareness and my confidences with surprising equanimity. She's a deeply understanding woman who loves me, even as she and I discover much more deeply whom I really am. The more I learn about my wife, the more it confirms the good sense I had to marry her in the first place.