What are your earliest memories of being desired?

Still waiting.

The first time I remember being conscious of a man finding me attractive was at school. I was in a queue waiting for some stationery and bent down to get something out of my bag. My friends who were standing close by reported the guy standing behind me had been obviously staring at my body. I didn’t notice and I was a bit taken aback by the idea.

That’s a fairly typical response. I’ve have always been quite oblivious to male (or female) attention and tend to either miss the signs or to feel shy and unsure how to respond to it. In saying that, I can flirt very well. I think my response is driven by how I feel about myself at that time. If I ‘feel’ desirable and atttractive I’m likely to react in a positive way if I find the person equally attractive. If I feel dowdy and unattractive or I’m focused on my work or a task that has no relation to desire and attractiveness, I’m likely to respond in an awkward, inhibited way. I don’t really feel comfortable with the overt male gaze. I remember being at work one day talking to a colleague who proceeded to very slowly look me up and down. He was a very attractive man, and the meaning was clear, but I was very uncomfortable with his behaviour. So while I have plenty of evidence that some men do find me attractive, that’s not how I view myself. I just don’t think of myself in that way.

When I was in pre-school a little boy had a crush on me. He would come up to me and smile at me. I thought it was neat.

In primary school. I didn’t like it, he was way too repulsive and I didn’t like him at all. One of them delinquent kids.

I never realised it except in retrospect. I am really quite oblivious to such things, even today.

I think the first thing that happened was a friend inviting me to “hang out with friends” at a school sports event and some church youth group party thing. I went because my friends would be there. Didn’t realise until way after that the kid thought it was a date. I think I was 14.

This girl who lived over the road from us & was in my class at school, she took me into the bushes & showed me her “front bottie” As i’m sure you can appreciate, my ghast had, up until that point, never been so flabbered.
We were both around 7 at the time of this exposure & yes, the act was reciprocated :)

When I was 13 or 14, a couple of girls whistled at me. I was too nonplussed to respond. I decided they were doing it more for their own amusement than to signify any genuine interest and just kept walking. This happened a couple more times in my early teens. It was always out of the blue, from someone I didn’t know, and I always got defensive and self-conscious and ignored them and later wondered if they had been serious. By my late teens I was a walking stick figure with long greasy hair, a fuzzy chin, and bad acne, and I didn’t get whistled at any more.

I am not one of those women who has stories about men coming after me the instant I hit puberty. I know it happens – it happened to my sister – but it did not happen to me, for whatever reason. It’s kind of perverse that I used that as a reason to have poor self-esteem when I was young, as though this is a normal thing that should happen to young women and that it not happening meant I was ugly.

I had a boyfriend in high school but we were both pretty Puritanical about sex so he never displayed any amount of “wanting me” and although we kissed, I can’t say I felt super desired in that relationship. Which is fine, because I didn’t want to go there yet.

It wasn’t until college at my 3:1 male:female school that I finally got that sort of attention, and I was so inexperienced with it that I handled it very poorly and I have a lot of regrets surrounding that whole experience. I guess you have to have a first time though, and at least I got the fuck ups out of the way with people who now have no bearing on my life.

A boy in 1st grade had a crush on me and puked all over the back of my chair because I “made him nervous”. Other than that, it was 10 more years before another boy showed any interest.

Can I ask a question about some of the responses here? Do people who are citing early childhood connections as romantic or erotic believe those interactions were about desire? I had little boyfriends and played doctors and nurses and the like as a little child, but I’ve never thought of them as really being romantic or driven by desire.

At 14. I-won’t-tell-you-how-many decades later she still feels the same way, thank goodness.

And vice versa.

How did/do I react? With humility and pure amazement.

@Earthbound_Misfit I certainly wouldn’t say mine was driven by eroticism. As far as “romantic connections”, I dunno. That’s kind of a hard word to quantify.

If we are talking about feeling desired in that more sexually charged way….I’d have to say that started for me when I was 12 with my first boyfriend. We didn’t do more than hold hands, but I certainly felt that special connection.

I reacted with much happiness and giggly talking with my friends.

One of my sisters’ friends really kissed me when I was 3! She was probably 13. What the! She was cute, but I still told on her! She could also righteously belch into the chimney like a megaphone…. Cute little dirty blonde named Michelle.