The older I get, the more I notice how much of an impact OWL has had on my life. I wonder if other people feel so strongly, though, as I’ve never actually met another adult graduate. They seem really hard to find! In the past 2 years of attending all 3 UU churches in my large metro area, I’ve never run into another late 20s/early 30s attendee who grew up in the church. I would really love to find a community of other people who also went through OWL, but it doesn’t even seem like there are forums or FB groups for graduates.

Thought maybe I’d have some luck here.

Mostly I’d like to hear from other OWL grads about how it’s affected your dating and friendships.

Personally I feel like the comprehensive curriculum, combined with lots of practice from a young age in having deep conversations about sex & relationships, was almost like being inadvertently signed up for a lifetime role as peer sex educator. Which was fine for a while, I was happy to do that in college, but now I guess I just feel kind of burnt out from years of being the person people called when they had a contraception question or STD crisis, or talk through their sex hangups or gender identity issues, or about their abusive relationships. (I also did literally work as rape crisis counselor and worked in the lab of for my family’s medical clinic, so those things probably also contributed to why people saw me as a resource. So, maybe this isn’t a common experience for OWL folks, I’m not sure.)

Relatedly: Does anyone else find having massively better sex ed than 99% of the population makes it really challenging to date?

I’m hoping I have just had a string of rotten luck and need to have my perspective reset, but I sometimes feel like I’m living a Groundhog Day style sex-ed nightmare in how often I find myself returning to middle-school level conversations about STD prevention with potential dates. I now literally keep a file of pamphlets about the Gardisil HPV vaccine to hand out, for instance. (All these people were eligible for free or affordable vaccination, and none had medical contraindications, I should note. Frankly, most of them have been science grad students or Ph.D.s, so it’s not like they lacked access to information or care.)

There’s an article on the UUworld website written by a doctor and OWL facilitator which talks about a similar experience:

I was discussing a case about contraception with my first-year medical students recently and had just launched into a tirade about how latex and polyurethane condoms are the only kinds that protect against sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Looking around the table, I was taken aback to see blank stares. These brilliant, accomplished adults knew less about condoms, I realized, than the seventh graders in the sexuality-education class I teach at my church.

Frankly, part of me worries about offending people even here by putting it so bluntly (because people have been), but can't figure out why I'm failing to meet more adults who have “mastered” basic sex ed, or at least the OWL basics — like contraception, disease prevention, and understand the differences between intimacy/romance/sensuality/sexuality, and how varied sexuality is across people and cultures. Somewhere between high school and my late 20s, finding a community of people like this has started to feel like an impossible dream — at least in the US. (According to the statistics I dug up there are only 200,000 people who have ever taken even 1 OWL class in the last 50 years…)

Perhaps I’ve somehow been going about it wrong and failing to attract the right people? (I admit I am an introvert, and not on social media … but I’d consider joining Twitter or using Reddit more if people could point me to an appropriate community for this type of stuff.)

Maybe someone here has some suggestions, or at least relate. If people want to talk about other experiences with OWL, I’d love to hear those, too. There weren’t many OWL-related results when I searched this forum. Thanks for reading.