March 13, 1999

March 13, 1999, marks Ted’s first sexual experience: he loses his virginity with Anna Travis in the upper bunk of the bed in the room she shares at college. The date follows months of courtship at a distance, but the encounter does not deliver the uncomplicated romantic fulfillment Ted has imagined. Instead, it exposes a mismatch between being loved and being desired that shapes the scene’s significance.

Place in the Chronology

The encounter comes three and a half months after Ted leaves a New Year’s Eve party with Anna, having arrived there with Rachel Derwin-Finkel. At the time, he experiences leaving with Anna as the greatest, most triumphant moment of his life. Looking back from a hospital stretcher twenty years later, he recognizes that things have gone badly from that point onward. March 13 falls within the aftermath of that decisive choice: the long-distance courtship has brought Ted and Anna to a shared room, but the later perspective casts a shadow over what might otherwise read as a romantic milestone.

The Encounter

In Anna’s college room, Ted and Anna are both surprised when he has difficulty maintaining an erection. The narration attributes his difficulty to Anna’s solemn expression: he reads her as though she were enduring an unpleasant necessity rather than wanting to be with him. But that interpretation is immediately corrected. Anna has sex with him because she loves him, and because she regards sex as a normal part of a balanced relationship. The moment therefore turns not on an absence of affection, but on the difference between affection and the kind of desire Ted hopes to inspire.

Love, Safety, and Desire

Anna calls Ted good because he feels safe to her: she trusts that his love means he will not hurt her. Ted, however, wants to be desired intensely, even against the other person’s better judgment. The contrast reaches beyond the couple. Anna had desired Marco Hernandez in that more consuming way; Ted desired Anna that way, and he later thinks Rachel may have desired him similarly. March 13 makes visible the imbalance between the security Anna values in Ted and the desperate desire he wants from women—a discrepancy that complicates the apparent triumph of their relationship beginning.