I wasn't married to the first girl who kissed me. Her name was Carla and she was my first girlfriend. Since she was 15 and I was 17, that might not seem like a big deal. Except that I was also Muslim.

The second, third and fourth were prenuptial, too. With the fifth, at the tail end of high school, I made the opening move, mostly because she told me she usually never did. Naturally she reacted exactly as I'd feared. "I can't believe," she said, with genuine astonishment, "you kissed me!" My response to this, I should note, was to kiss her again.

Forget premarital conjugations: prophetic precedent says Muslims aren't even supposed to touch before tying the knot. But there's a difference between what you think you should do, and what you want to do, especially when you're 17. There seemed nothing worse than continuing the lonely life of the singular minority.

Growing up, we weren't even allowed to talk about sex. This seemed doable, at least until puberty. Take Sunday school, for example, where we'd learn that the Prophet Muhammad would wake late at night to pray, and do so by nudging his sleeping wife's legs gently out of the way. We were supposed to be focused on the piety. Meanwhile, I wondered to myself: would I ever be pushing anyone's legs out of the way?

My parents once rained hell down upon me for offering a female student a ride home. So how was I going to pull off going to the prom? What should have been an ordinary ritual of growing up seemed to require the most elaborate preparations I'd ever made to keep my parents from finding out. There were other anxieties too. How was I going to make the money to pay for it? How was I going to get parental permission slips signed without parental permission?

So when I first saw the call for submissions to Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex & Intimacy, I'd no interest in sharing. How could I tell the people I had grown up with, the Muslim communities I'd become a part of, that I wasn't who they thought I was? It seemed impossible.

So what turned me from sinning to telling?

Around a year ago, I met an undergraduate who'd sought out my counsel. He had a girlfriend, whom his parents disapproved of. But he wasn't sure if he should be with her, either. He was trapped between who he was and who he wanted to be. "I love her," he sighed. "And I don't understand why that's wrong." Because, I replied, monotheism makes monogamous demands, a lesson I'd learned the hard way.

I eventually submitted my story about my sneaking out to prom to the book Salaam, Love because I wanted to be more honest in my writing. And honesty, it turns out, is revelatory. I was not then, and am not now, alone in loneliness. There's an epidemic of young Muslim men who don't know how to talk about love, and don't realize how badly they'll need to. Meanwhile they suffer in silence, caught between an almost charmingly naïve desire for intimacy and a deeply felt piety.

I know, because I spend every other weekend traveling, visiting Muslims all across the US. I give Friday sermons. I sit on panels discussing Muslim identity. I teach Islamic history. I also defend my religion against those who do it harm. This has taken me across the country, not just to talk, but also to listen. Young folks reach out to me. We'll talk, sometimes for hours, often about things I wish I myself could have discussed with someone else when I was young.

Muslim men have the right and the need to tell our story. We aren't stone-cold Neolithic leftovers or pseudo-biblical Semitic patriarchs just looking for someone to suffocate. My desire for companionship was so strong I pursued it even against my own interests.

There were days when I was glad Carla had been in my life, the easy answer to, "do you regret what you did?" But there were more days when her absence would all but destroy me. It took me years to get over her. Why? Even now, I remember each and every girl I ever kissed. They didn't just move on; they moved on with me. I'd invested in intimacy, hoping to deflect fears that would otherwise have been the death of me. I turned to them instead of to Him, looking for people to fix, ironically, what no person can.

There's an unequalled serenity that comes from the Divine, but He's not a warm body. Nor a hand to hold. But He is also the answer I'd get, as much as I might not want to listen to it, when I stared at an empty bed and realized I was the only person in it. Years later, enough of me accepted this to get my head down on the floor to pray.

Though there are no legs to nudge out of the way. And even now I'm astonished at how much I wish there were.