Over at Narratively.com, our sister storytelling site, we’ve been publishing the winners of our True Romance Writing Prize, the contest we launched with actor Emma Roberts and Belletrist in March. This past Friday, we published one of the shortread finalists, a tale from Bar Scott about unexpected and highly forbidden romance, which got us thinking…
Inspired by Bar’s essay, we want to know about a romance (or crush) that you had to keep secret. Did you fall for your best friend’s beau? Agree to marry your true love’s brother The Summer I Turned Pretty style? Covet a crush on your teacher in high school that you couldn’t even confide in your BFF about? No time like right now to come clean about it. Drop a few lines in the comments below about your forbidden love — and then, if you feel so inclined, keep writing off the page. See where the story takes you. Maybe it’s the beginning of your next screenplay…or an exercise that simply gets the gears turning. Whatever it is, share away. We can’t wait to hear your stories!
Mine was a secret love so hidden it took me more than fifty years to uncover it. As a child, any hint of love for myself was beaten out of me. I was called useless, worthless, told in word and in fist that I did not deserve to exist. Every blow carved silence into me, every insult buried whatever tenderness I might have held for myself.
So I carried that emptiness into adulthood, masking it with achievement, striving to prove my value to a world that could never fill what had been stolen. I married, raised a daughter, and built deep and enduring friendships across the world. From the outside it looked like I had everything, and in many ways I did—yet the secret remained.
The one love I could never name was the one I had hidden away since childhood: love for myself. To finally stop running, to look at the boy who had been called useless and say, ‘You are worthy. You are enough. I love you’—that has been the most liberating truth of my life.
When I was 15, I started dating a guy who was 28. He looked like Gary from "30-Something." And played in a band named Sneakers. I'd tell my parents I was going over to my friend's house to study but I'd drive the car to a super sketchy part of Hartford, CT, where he lived, get high, and make out with him. (That's all we did. Luckily, he knew the law). Nothing about it seemed weird or inappropriate. I finally told my mother about him before I left for college. I was not a kid who broke rules or kept secrets, everything was always written on my face or pinned to my sleeve, so she was floored. And impressed. She was wild as a teen and probably didn't think I had it in me.