The way I was

I guess that when I was a teenager I always thought of myself as a pretty cool guy.  And as life went on, that didn’t change, at least not in most ways.  I did pretty well at school and after college I ended up with a good job, working as a photographer for a local newspaper.  Photography had always been my hobby, so I was pretty pleased to be able to make a living out of it.  I was lucky too because I always seemed pretty popular with girls.  Later on, when I started working as a fashion photographer, I realised that I must be pretty attractive, because there were quite a few models who hit on me.

But back then, I had a steady girlfriend and I wasn’t interested in playing the field.  I was really in love with my girlfriend Carol and we were really happy together.  We started having sex in our last year of high school, and neither of us had been with anyone else.  For about five years, everything was just about perfect.

So you can imagine my shock when one day she told me that she was breaking up with me because she had met someone else.  I was really broken up and didn’t know what to go.  But a few weeks after Carol left, things got even worse when I found some photos she’d left in a hidden file on the computer we used to share.  She’d transferred everything else of hers onto her new laptop, but I guess she forgot about these.  They were intimate pics of her with her new boyfriend, and it was immediately obvious that he was a much bigger guy than me, in every sense.  I hadn’t really thought much about my size before that, but now I began to wonder if maybe I was a bit on the small side.

Time heals everything and after a while I started dating.  I guess that was okay, I went out with a few cool girls and slept with a few of them.  Mostly that was okay, although it was never like it was with Carol in the old days.  And pretty soon I realised that none of them were coming back for more.

That’s when it really came home that I didn’t really measure up down there.  I was lucky, I suppose, because none of the girls I was with were nasty about it, but once I’d sized up the situation, it was obvious that they were pretty unimpressed.  And so was I.  In fact I started getting a bit of a complex about it.  Pretty soon, I stopped dating altogether, because I was embarrassed about my small manhood.

Life can really be ironic.  By the time I was thirty, I was doing really well as a fashion photographer.  I wasn’t doing shoots for big magazines or anything, but I was doing a lot of store catalogues and working with a lot of really beautiful women.  And some of them were really interested in me.  My friends were all envious, thinking that I was dating a string of beautiful models and in fact I would take one of these girls out from time to time.  But the truth was that I would usually cut the evening short with an excuse about having to work early in the morning.

By now it was clear to me that I had to do something.  I didn’t want to spend my life sleeping alone, but how would I ever meet a woman to share my life with when I was too ashamed to sleep with anyone?