It’s the summer of 2011 and I was about to meet my long distance boyfriend in person for the first time. I was ecstatic, but apprehensive. You see, things didn’t really work out the way we had planned. At 19 and 20 years old, we were both still in college and both still lived with our parents, and despite what we had told them, we had only been officially dating for a month. We weren’t stupid or impulsive, either. We knew it was a bad idea to meet up with a stranger from the internet that you had been flirting with for a month. We liked each other a lot, but still didn’t make it a “good” plan. Unfortunately that was just how life worked out. Neither of us had transportation and it just so happened that my mom decided to take a vacation relatively near his house that month. Since she didn’t plan on vacationing at any other point that summer and his mom certainly wasn’t going to make the trip any later in the summer, we both knew that would be our one chance to meet up. It was a risk, staying with someone you met on the internet for a week at his parents’ house...but that’s exactly what happened.

His house was a bit smaller than mine, but still very comfortable. His bedroom and bathroom were the only things on the second floor, which meant that we would have a fair amount of privacy. Of course, things weren’t quite that simple, though. For one, his bedroom didn’t have a door, and while the heavy curtain hung over the door frame provided a comfortable amount of light/visual blocking, noise-blocking wasn’t exactly its strong suit. Also complicating things was the fact that his bedroom was virtually right above his mother’s room, a location-planning flaw that hadn't been an issue...until I came to visit. Finally came two smaller, but also contributing issues. One was that his mother was a rather restless sleeper and frequently woke during the night. The other was that she sporadically came into his room while he was asleep to borrow his cordless phone when the batteries on her own ran out.

As with the vast majority of my online relationships, boyfriend and I had a fair amount of chemistry. To say the least, we were both sexually adventurous and amply horny and inevitably we spent our first few days together talking, having sex, eating, sleeping, and...having more sex. At this point neither of us had any qualms about sleeping with the other person and it had been a few months since either of us had the company of another person, so we were more than ready. With a normal girl, this wouldn't have been an issue. Normal girls understand when to be quiet and when to be loud and have a reasonable amount of control over their vocal cords. Not me, though. Not me.

The worst part of the entire situation was that I didn't find out that my noise level had been a problem until after I left and my boyfriend took the heat for it. His mother had been too polite to say anything while I was there, but as soon as I left, he heard plenty about it. The final verdict was that I was loud. I had woken her up and kept her up several times, and that on the whole, she was not amused. Worst of all, through the period where I was there, she couldn't exactly send me home because I didn't have a car and I lived four hours away, so she just rode it out. As the cherry on top of the cake, she was also privilege to several awkward moments where she entered my boyfriend’s room to get his cordless phone and found lovely sightings such as my dildos stuck to the wall or laying on the floor. Awesome.

It took a long time for her to forgive me for my sexual trespasses in her home. And in the end, it was to be expected. After all, one of the most disrespectful things you can do to a parent is to have sex with their child in their home—while they’re home. Generally speaking though, people do it discreetly all the time and no one is the wiser. Unless, of course, you’re me. This wasn't the first time we had some awkward experiences with family, but thankfully the next time we were together it was at my mother’s house where the noise issues that we had previously were almost non-existent. In the end, the reality is that it’s just difficult to balance sex and your family, whether that family consists of your own children or the people that raised you. Furthermore, often the most stressful times of our lives are those in which we are surrounded by family, planning events, holidays, and more. Squeezing in the time (and privacy) for sex is challenging, to say the least. Finding the balance between respect and your own needs can be extremely difficult and if you’re not careful, can lead to some bad feelings in the long run.

Even after the somewhat bad experience I had with sex and family in the last year, I still don’t regret it. Sex is one of the most intimate and fun things you can do with another person and I wouldn't trade those first two weeks with my boyfriend for anything, even his mother’s approval. Should I have handled things a little differently? Absolutely. Should I have abstained from sex out of respect? I don’t necessarily think so. Respect can manifest itself in many different ways and sometimes those ways are as simple as keeping your private life private when it involves certain people.