Welcome to Women of the Hour. This is our 11-sex bonus episode. We all have a first love,

and here Anne Helen Peterson, a writer at Buzzfeed, talks about hers.

He was a year older. He was my chemistry partner, and he was so hot.

He had this classic football player build, but he was short. Sometimes I describe it as kind of

tom Cruise short, and he just had this amazing smile. Where we grew up in Idaho, to be a football player

was this specific sort of royalty. His uniform was a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt,

and sometimes on game days they'd wear their jerseys over their t-shirts.

And he had.

You know, we had chemistry for a stower together, and it always be tired,

and he would take a little nap and put his gum on top of his hat just to keep it there for safe

keeping. And that whole year we were just friends, just kind of flirting friends. He was dating

this other girl that I knew who was a volleyball player and so jealous of her.

And I was a cheerleader, but I was different than most girls in my school.

Guys didn't like me. I never got asked to dance as hardly except for our friends.

I didn't have any confidence in myself, or in that idea that intelligence could be attractive.

But day in, day out, we were working as lab partners, and he had to see my intelligence and

had to flirt with it essentially. And then he went to Virginia Military Institute,

which again, people from Lewis to Idaho just don't go that far away for school or make a decision

that is that radical. That whole year he was what's called a rat, and it's like your first year of

just essentially getting hates non-stop. It sounds like torture. And we would talk all the time.

Mostly I think he was just very lonely. And that developed into something like a deeper

friendship which developed into a relationship. And we spent the next couple of years going back

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