Bundling

Anna Fondant made an oblique reference to bundling as a courtship ritual, and I started to write a long comment until I realized it was a bit TMI for her likely commentators, or commentors as the word ought to be but isn't.

First I said something about winter bundling, because that was a thing indeed once upon a time, in Colonial New England as well as related areas in Europe (the Netherlands and the British Isles). Not restricted to winter, but if you're going to be sewn up in a bag, you probably don't want to do it through a New England summer night.

My story was that I was bundled once. While I was at Sac State, my roommate talked me into spending my student loan on a trip to Mexico. He was a brilliant (so far as I knew) financial expert with a college degree who owned his own home. His pitch was that I wouldn't be charged interest on the loan until I graduated. Unless I truly needed the money for school, which I didn't because I was used to working and living on the cheap, it was a can't-lose situation.

We had various adventures over the three weeks. Since he was outgoing but (in my opinion) wrestling with unexamined sexual identity confusion and I was terrifically shy, there was no "action" of the sort some people would assume. But we did meet a couple girls in Mexico City and go out with them several times, and nothing happened there mainly because I never got Eduarda alone. One night I went by myself with her to visit her family, and though only her uncle had any English and not much at that, we had a nice time. I stayed too late to go back, and so I was invited to stay. Everyone -- Eduarda, aunt, uncle, two nephews, and a grandmother -- slept in the same room. Uncle and grandmother got one bed, girl and aunt and guest got the other, and the children rolled around on the floor with the dogs. I was carefully wrapped up in sheets so as to preserve decency, and spent a long, long night all bundled up and feeling absolutely miserable.

I was unhappy because I had fallen in love after a fashion with this young woman with whom I shared a remarkable sympatico, but I could neither talk to her nor reach out and embrace her. I wondered how it was that I fell so fast when I had a lovely girlfriend at home, and it was then that I had (for the first time though not the last) the epiphany that told me I had been wrong all those years to try and be a perfect gentleman, but should simply have been reaching for what I wanted. When I got home the girlfriend and I started breaking up, though it took us a couple months. Our last date was the night after my first date with the woman I was to marry.