I grew up in the north of Sweden, about 2 hours drive south of the polar circle. The climate resembles Alaska’s and it was pretty rural up there when I was a kid.
During my first 6 years of life, my parents rented a property on a farm, and I had one single friend, a girl named Susanne for all that time. My 2 year younger sister didn’t count for much. For my first 6 years I was aware that other boys existed because I occasionally met one and I saw them on TV, but for all intents and purposes they did not exist in my world.
I don’t know how I would have turned out if I had a balanced supply of male and female friends, but I will of course never know. We moved to town (population around 25,000 at the time) just before I turned 7 and I was almost feral in interacting with boys, not having been socialized with them. I ended up in a lot of fights and I got beaten in many of them. And still, I felt a kinship with them that was hard to explain, although I would connect with and understand girls better than they did.
Note that it did not make me girly; I just interacted with girls differently than the other boys. It did mean, also, that I was engaged to be married at age 5 when I proposed to Susanne as we were playing house and she happily accepted. Come to think of it, we never broke off the engagement. He he.
In pre-school, on the first day, I met a girl with long, raven hair and I never looked back. That was my first instance of falling in love; I had never felt anything like that before and I still remember it so many years later. Sadly, I cannot remember her name but I snagged the chair next to her and I followed her around like a puppy-dog the entire year.
A year after that, in first grade, I met Helen, with luxurious long blond hair, and so it went. It would be until age 15 before I got into a girl’s panties, though, and that was all her own doing. It would be with another girl with long, raven hair; her name was Hilde, she was Norwegian, and I’ve sung her praises before.
