To give some context here, I didn't seriously date in high school. Occasionally, a guy would get a date, but it was a first and last date. To be honest, I preferred time with friends. I went to dances as long as I knew the guy also knew it was platonic. I legitimately said no to going to homecoming with a guy who had a crush on me because the feelings weren't reciprocated on my end, and I didn't think it was fair to lead him on or make him pay for an incredibly expensive evening when I knew I wasn't interested. He did not handle that particularly well, but I still think I made the right choice. My dating mistakes could fill a dictionary, but the one mistake I never made was leading someone on when I wasn't interested. It always struck me as cruel and just unnecessary.
I was only 17 when I graduated high school and started college. I don't regret my choice to put my dating life on the sidelines during those years, but my decision did make for one incredibly naive and inexperienced 18 year old.
I met X when I was 18. At that age, my physical appearance betrayed me. People readily make assumptions about teenage girls in general. As a thin teen girl with blue eyes, blonde hair, clear skin, and long legs, more than one college guy made the assumption that I was easy. I still don't entirely understand how anyone could think my physical traits, pure genetics, translated into promiscuity. I was not equipped to handle conversations about sex as a freshman in college, so I typically let people make whatever assumption they wanted. The guys who were showing interest in me at that time were mostly two to three years older than me and jumped to talking about sex in about a week, sometimes less. They made it clear they wanted to sleep with me with minimal work on their end and typically disappeared quickly when they realized that would not be happening for them. In hindsight, I appreciate how upfront they were. I can handle brutal honesty.
When I met X , he billed himself as a "nice guy," and I believed him. Unlike me, he actually attended Church which I assumed would make my parents happy. I attended Catholic school for quite some time growing up, but I never quite mastered going to mass every weekend, possibly because I never tried it. The first time we spent the day together, I was in the passenger seat of his car when he called his grandmother for directions because we got lost. He then showered her with praise. After my first year of college where I was inundated with upperclassmen hitting on me in very sexual ways, a "nice" 19 year old guy who wanted to talk about his grandma felt like a welcome reprieve.
I liked X in the way that really only a naive and angsty teenager is capable of liking someone. I will admit that I wasn't entirely up front about my feelings for X at 18, but I also assumed that I didn't need to ask if he liked me back at the time. All the key dating moments were present and accounted for that summer. We met each other's parents. We went miniature golfing. We shared icecream despite the fact that I have been lactose intolerant since I was 10 years old. He shoved me into a wave. I pretended to be mad and splashed him. His hand inched toward mine during the first movie we watched together at my parents' house. No matter how many friends we were with, we always magically sat or stood next to each other. I giggled at his terrible puns for jokes, and they actually were tragically bad jokes. He faked annoyance about the long strands of blonde hair he found in his car and on his clothes. He was arguably my first real kiss. He was definitely the first guy to cross any bases. I handed these emotions and moments over easily. We went to the same college, and things between us didn't feel forced. I trusted him.
At the end of the summer, I was out with him when I met one of his roommates for the upcoming school year for the first time. His roommate asked him about a girl whose name I had never heard before that moment, and X responded with a comment about possibly breaking in their dorm room couch with her. His words doused me in cold water, and I didn't feel like I could react in front of his roommate who I had known for a whole ten minutes. The drive back to my house was filled with silence as I replayed every moment of that summer. I wondered what signal or clue I missed. I wondered why I wasn't enough. I blamed myself.
People reading this blog will assume I lost my virginity to him that summer. I did not. I lost other things: my certainty in my ability to read people, the iota of self-confidence I spent years building as a teenage girl, my faith in people to tell the truth, moments and time that should have been spent with better people. I went from being a giggling teenage girl to being a very skeptical one over the course of one summer.
As an adult, it's easy for me to know that he was and is a callous jackass. I know now that I paid the price for his insecurities. I also know that I never considered that he might have been the problem when I was younger (It's him! Hi! He is the problem. It's him). It didn't even occur to me that the only self-proclaimed "nice" guy I ever dated was the one to continually screw me over the most. As it turns out, good people don't have to tell you they are "nice." I missed that red flag. Feeling used by someone is awful; feeling used by someone I trusted made it worse. I didn't tell my parents because I didn't want my dad in jail for life for killing someone, and anyone who met my dad knows I'm not being hyperbolic. I didn't tell my friends everything because I was embarrassed by the situation.
We only made out a handful of times after; there were probably corpses with more self-esteem than he left me with after that summer. Gradually, I became better at drawing the line at friendship. It helped that my self-esteem increased a lot in the following year. You know that moment in movies where the obviously attractive girl takes her glasses off? I had that moment, but I never had actual glasses. I was at the top of my major. I had a lot of friends. I also had an influx of guys who actually wanted to date me, even when I was very clear that there would be actual work involved. Things were more or less going well for me at the end of my sophomore year of college.
The summer after sophomore year of college, X bailed on last minute plans with me because he was "tired from work." I took it in stride. I had a lot of friends in my orbit. A group of us decided to get ice cream from the new parlor in our hometown where someone's younger sibling worked. As soon as I walked into the door, a friend pointed out X who was there with a girl and seemingly not so tired. I'm not sure which part of the situation made me so mad. It could have been the lie about being tired, it could have been that he then had the audacity to show up in my hometown for his outing, it could have been the year of anger boiling right under the surface, or it could have been that he casually walked up to me as though he hadn't just bailed on me two hours earlier. It didn't matter. I was livid. My dad had a knack with creative cursing. I inherited the ability. I'm not going to write what I said, but it was enough to keep him out of my life for seven months.
I'm not writing about my teenage years for myself. Those years have been in my rearview mirror for awhile now, and I'm well aware that people will make assumptions about whether I'm prudish or slutty as I write. Here's the thing. I already lived through both of those accusations, sometimes simultaneously actually, and I lived through them at an age where my confidence relied on what other people thought of me. Gratefully, my days of worrying about being judged are also in my rearview mirror.
The only reason that I'm writing about my old dating life is that I don't think my experiences are special or extraordinary, and I wish I had put aside my fear of being judged for the comfort of talking to someone. I have taught enough teenagers in the past 15 years to know that the fear of judgment is alive and well in the age of social media, and all of the ambiguities and uncertainties still exist in the dating world. I didn't have the relationship talk because I wanted to be the cool girl. As it turns out, I would much rather be the not so cool girl than the used girl. While I effectively closed the door when I cursed him out, I failed to lock it behind me as I questioned if I was being a "bitch" or "insecure." If that first summer was the opening scene to our horror movie, what he did later looks like and was an absolute bloodbath.
The picture at the top of the post? I believe it was taken during my senior year of high school. Those days were filled with human pyramids, baked cookies, and genuine laughter. Growing up, I frequently just launched myself at people and assumed they would catch me, and no matter how much I was being a pain that day, everyone always did catch me. In that picture and moment, I never thought about what would happen if the pyramid collapsed or the many different ways it could go wrong. X taught me what happened when someone wasn't there to break that fall, and I really wish I had gotten to be the silly girl in the picture for just a little longer.
To be continued....