In the early 1970s, Seventeen magazine urged prepubescent me to guard my self-respect, which meant, I knew, to not be obvious about liking a boy. The same message came through in the stories we were raised on, the TV shows we watched. Yvette Mimieux nearly died from wanting it in the classic teenage melodrama “Where the Boys Are,” and much, much earlier, Eve got all of humanity kicked out of Eden by wanting that apple. Her punishment: Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. The first woman and the first lesson.

So I grew up believing that girls were supposed to be wanted, but we were not supposed to want. If we did want, we were never, ever to show it. Any move on behalf of our own desires should be in service of getting men to act on theirs.

I always envied the girls who seemed so peaceful waiting for boys to talk to them; I wasn’t of that tribe. My mother used to shake her head and say, “Just let them come to you,” but I was no good at biding my time. In sixth grade, I asked a boy I liked if he liked me; in freshman year of college, I asked a man I was attracted to if he felt the same. In each case, I felt that something was wrong with me for having brought up the topic. I was too much like a guy, I thought. But even then, I was asking them about their desires, not speaking my own.

As I got older, I developed other methods for getting a man to make the first move: bumping into him as we walked together, shivering with unfelt cold, standing fetchingly on steps that would bring me to his eye level — all so he’d be overtaken with desire and, for God’s sake, kiss me. So much work, this active passivity — but I never considered kissing any of them first. After all, what worse insult can a man give a woman than “She wanted it,” a phrase that carries its own sneer.

So the reason that afternoon is still so bright in my memory, why I can still feel the metal chain of the swing in my hand, see Matthew’s smile: Sadie Hawkins was a day of respite from pretending not to want, or from distorting my want into a hint.