Gender and Sexuality

The primary focus of "We Didn't" is sexuality and the differing experiences between adolescent men and adolescent women as they start to become sexually active. The epigraph that opens the story comes from a poem that celebrates sexual union as a something that can happen anywhere. The narrator adopts the language of that poem to describe the abundant situations in which he and his girlfriend did not have sex, demonstrating an ironic relationship between the memories of sexual encounters and the memories of their absence. In this way, the young narrator develops a somewhat bitter tone as he laments the fact that he is still a virgin, but the older narrator finds beauty in those close encounters. "How adept we were at fumbling," he says, "how perfectly mistimed our timing, how utterly we confused energy with ecstasy" (234). In this way, the story is set...