There are a few things I know for certain about that night. I know that I was a god at beer pong. I know I was at a party that I had no business at, but happened to be down the street from my apartment. I know that when I walked in I spotted a guy in a mullet wig with a drawn on handle bar mustache and knew he was a student at the Naval Postgraduate School where I worked. I groaned. There was no way for me to know then that within two years I’d marry that man, and that more than five years later I couldn’t imagine my life without him.

It started with Ramsey. It was a typical Saturday night, and I’d texted my friends to see if anything was going on. I didn’t particularly want to go out, but I wanted to check my options. Ramsey was the one to text back that there was a mustache and wig party (so 2011) in my neighborhood. I could tag along.

I did. Ramsey and I partnered with a stranger and formed a champion beer pong team. On the edges of each game I noticed a guy, the same NPS student, was hanging around. He was a friend of the stranger we’d paired with.

I learned at least one lesson that night: even a champion beer pong team still ends up drinking a lot of beer over the course of a few games. I was not immune. But instead of full-blown inebriation, I was generally feeling good. Karaoke good.

That NPS student started talking to me. Apparently I’d helped him before in my capacity as a registrar employee. He seemed so interested, and for me, just then, that was exactly what I needed.

A couple of months prior to this night, I’d told my then male best friend I wanted to be more. He declined. I didn’t honestly think I’d find anything of value with the opposite sex for many more months or years to come.

Then I met Cameron. He was smoking and drinking cobra malt liquor out of a brown paper bag. He was raised in Tennessee but he doesn’t have an accent, unless he is drinking and around another person from Tennessee. That night he happened to be with a friend from Knoxville.

He charmed me.

For the rest of the party we were inseparable. The photo above is actually from that night. After the party wound down he offered to walk me the 4 blocks home. We held hands. I remember him saying he wanted to take me out, and that he could already tell we were going to be “that” couple- the couple that’s so cute it’s annoying. He was right.

I had a tiny apartment then that shared a front stoop with my neighbor, a woman I was pretty sure dealt drugs in her spare time. I’d planned to give Cameron a chaste kiss at my front door and hope he actually called. When we got to my place at around two in the morning, my neighbor was sitting outside with a gentleman caller, and I couldn’t have my adorable good night in front of them.

So I let him in. It was only supposed to be for a few minutes. Just long enough to give a little smooch then say goodnight. But one smooch turned into two, and suddenly I was waking up to daylight, still fully clothed, thank you very much, and a sweaty (also fully clothed) dude was next to me.

Shit. Nothing had happened aside from kissing, but I really wasn’t into finding myself in bed with a stranger after a night out. Now I had to figure out how to wake him up and usher him out.

Cameron was thankfully already awake. We started the awkward dance of conversation between two people who don’t know each other, but happened to share a bed the night before.

Conversation flowed. There were no awkward pauses. We got along. He asked if I was a dog or a cat person. I’d never had a cat before, so I answered honestly: dog.

He told me that he had a dog named Gus. It brought me back to a day in first grade when both of my parents pulled up to school in the minivan even though Sarah and I usually took the bus. They opened the sliding door to the backseat and on the floor was a cardboard box. In that box there was a puppy. We named him Gus. I couldn’t believe this man had his own Gus.

Later in the conversation I asked what he wanted to be after the Navy. A writer, he said. At that time I wasn’t writing. I’d given up on fiction and I didn’t think anyone would be interested in what I had to write about. I still knew deep down that I wanted to write. He wanted the same.

That morning we talked for four hours before he had to go. We could have talked for longer. It’s been more than five years since then and we can still talk for hours. Somehow on that first morning together, between finding out about his Gus (now my Gus) and his facility as a writer, I knew that we had something. We still do.

Over the weekend I read through novel synopses for my peers in a graduate creative writing class. Most were good and I’m excited to see how they develop. One, however, shocked me both by its overt sexism, and because the author seemed totally oblivious to the fact that it was incredibly sexist.

I won’t go through all the details of the plot, but it involved a man in a power position dating an unnamed Japanese-American woman who has never had an orgasm. The man makes it his quest to make her climax. They have a “great” relationship, and the man wants to propose to this woman, but isn’t sure if he can unless he can make her orgasm. That premise alone is so mind-boggling and icky in its cluelessness that I realized just how alive and well sexism is in America.

First off, ladies don’t need a guy to get off. If a woman is sexually active and has never climaxed through intercourse, chances are she would take the matter into her own hands eventually (pun intended). Also, I may be a bit jaded on this one as a military spouse currently on a 6-month sex moratorium thanks to my husband’s deployment, but sex really isn’t the most important part of a marriage. Sex is great, orgasms are awesome, but it’s not the foundation of a relationship.

It’s also problematic that the guy is an authority figure, and holds all the power of possible marriage and presumed happiness (because all a woman needs to be happy is a wedding ring, #obvi). I could go on and on about how much this synopses irks me, but the end result is it’s gross in how belittling it is to women, and highlights how subconscious sexism is still prevalent.

Dudes still think of women as sex objects instead of people! Not all of them, but some do. I’m lucky enough to have had good men in my life who all support strong women. It didn’t seem possible that there might be a real contingency of men, and even some women, who think of women as inferior.

I’ve gotten catcalls on the street, been groped in public by strangers, and had at least one boss who blatantly checked out my rack on the regular. It’s not great knowing that my gender is one reason why I’ll likely always make less money than my spouse, or that my mom used to have male employees who made more money than she did as their supervisor. These things are upsetting, but reading this synopsis was the first time I got really angry about sexism in America.

The guy who wrote the synopsis is an award-winning writer. He’s got his Master’s and is on track for a PhD. He should be an intelligent human being. His critiques and comments in class are always well reasoned and informed. How then, did this grown man, with an adult son, achieve such a warped view of women?

It’s got to be something in society that lets some men believe that women are more valuable for their sexuality than intellect. A woman’s orgasm is not the core of her being or abilities. It’s a nice treat, but fleeting. Nobody should be valued by sexual performance. The fact that any man feels that a woman’s marriageability is entwined with her ability to orgasm is complete bullshit. We need to work on making the world a place where that idea isn’t a reality.