Although Casey left a scar on my heart, my outward behavior did not really change for the next few years. While I held it as a hard and fast rule that you do not reveal whom you like, I continued to notice whether or not boys were cute pretty regularly. I continued to play with boys a lot, primarily basketball, and Jennie and I were usually accompanied by boys when we would play on the tire trees. (We would pretend to be on flights with Graveyard Airlines. Yeah, I guess it was a little weird.)
I was also an avid participant in after-school sports, and when I got to pick teams, I would actually pick the cutest boys first, instead of the best athletes. To be fair, the first two picks were always the same, because JT and his friend (whose name I wish I could remember) were both good-looking and good at sports. It’s unfortunate that, as friends, they were rarely ever able to be on the same team, but it must be nice to be wanted. Anyway, there were plenty of boys around, but not really anyone significant until Stephen moved here in fifth grade.
I don’t know why I fell so hard, but I don’t think being new hurt his chances. We were in the TAG (talented and gifted) program together, and all of our classes were together, so we were able to bond that way, but he was not the only guy fitting that description. Of course, he was much taller than Josh, so it looks like that preference of mine started early.
If we remember back to first grade and Adam (the kind of weird guy who kissed me on the knee), there were guys who liked girls all the way back then, and by sixth grade there were boys who would talk about sex, though I think it was with very limited knowledge. Somewhere between those stages, “going with” people became all the rage. No one ever called it “going steady” or “going out”, and as fourth and fifth graders there was nowhere to go to, but still, it was very important.
Stephen hurt me greatly by going with Lora, but I stayed friends with him and was supportive when he was ignominiously dumped. However, the relationship did not really take off until we were at the end of sixth grade, and there was a special TAG outing. It was on a Friday, and we were going to hike from Hoyt Arboretum to the Pittock Mansion and picnic there, and we could all bring one guest.
Having extra students along, who were not TAG students, probably changed the dynamics a bit, and it was a picnic and the school year was ending, but somehow as Stephen and I were walking along carrying the picnic basket between us, jokes started flying about how it was like we were the parents and the others were our kids, and so there were other marriage and honeymoon and future jokes. I think I was able to get in some effective flirting, because later on the bus he awkwardly, but nonetheless sweetly, asked me if I meant it, and suddenly we were going with each other.
The euphoria was surprisingly short-lived. First of all, there were spectators and they were trying to get us to kiss, or at least each bite off the ends of the same pepperoni stick. (Shawna was involved again. She had come with Gabbie.) We went for the pepperoni, but I didn’t want to kiss him. Perhaps that should have been my first clue that my enthusiasm had waned.
Ultimately, I may have just waited too long for him. If he had asked me back in fifth grade, that would have been something, but now it was practically two years later, and I had let some other guys seep into my heart. There was a different Jason from church (who was very sweet and pretty cute and with whom I played basketball) and I had also started to like Geoff.
Geoff would have been my first official bad boy. I find it quite possible to believe that he has a criminal record of some kind now, but I don’t really know. I think I started liking him first when I loaned him lunch money. I’m not sure I ever got paid back, but he started treating me a bit more nicely, and I guess I was pretty easy. The point was, now that I had Stephen, I could not stop thinking about Jason and Geoff. Plus, Stephen called me over the weekend, and I should have found that sweet, but I found it annoying instead. He was getting a tad possessive for my taste.
Now, there had been boundary changes for the school districts the year before, and I ended up in Aloha Park boundaries. A few kids transferred already, but sixth-graders had the option to finish our last year of grade school at Chehalem. Four of us chose that, but were going to go to Five Oaks while everybody else went to Mountain View for junior high. Since we knew this, I had set an expiration date on our relationship, where we would just go together until the end of the school year, and then part amicably.
I should have stuck it out. Instead, I did what may be the most embarrassing thing I will ever confess on this blog. Monday, I went to Stephen on the playground. He was lined up for Four Square or Wall Ball—one of those games I never played because I was always playing basketball, and I told him that I knew we said we would go together until the end of the school year, but oh, I was having second thoughts or something. I don’t remember the reason I gave him, but I do remember saying, “…so consider yourself dumped.”
It was just rude and unnecessarily cruel, especially after I had seen how Lora’s dumping broke him up. I should have stayed with him for that last month, or just handled it better. As it was, I was disgusted with myself, not that I shared that with Stephen. I decided that I was just way too immature to date anyone, and that I would be for a while. Honestly, observing the other playground relationships, we probably all were, but at the time I really thought that the problem was me. That’s always my first guess anyway.
In the end he seems to have recovered fine. When we met up again in high school, he did not even seem to remember that we had ever been involved, and even if that is merely a memory block due to psychological pain, I’ll take it. He went to senior prom with Jennie, and I believe he has his own business now.
For myself, I did pick up a strong fear of hurting others, and it did lead to some relationship avoidance, because if he is not the one, then we are only getting together now to break up later, and why would we do that? Now I realize that learning how to behave in a relationship usually takes a few failures, and that’s why you do it, and you should do it, including breakups.
I actually kind of started to hate Meg Ryan after seeing parts of both Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail on television, and in both cases I saw the breakup moments. They both felt exactly the same way, and it was a perfectly fine, painless breakup, and my twisted mind decided that this was a concession to Meg’s image, like…
· I can’t be a cheater or heartbreaker because I am too sweet.
· He wouldn’t cheat on me or get tired of me because I am so adorable.
· I wouldn’t just be single, because there is nothing wrong with me to keep me single.
Therefore, the only solution to the inescapable complication of plotting a romantic comedy around a sweet adorable catch like Meg Ryan is spontaneous amicable breakups. It worked on a Seinfeld episode, but they treated it differently. (Also, she cheated on the roguishly charming Dennis Quaid with Russell Crowe, who is enormously talented and fairly handsome, but seems to have some real ego and anger issues. That’s okay, I’m sure it was really just that Meg and Dennis spontaneously grew apart.)
Anyway daters, you may have to hurt someone in the course of figuring out the relationship issue. However, if you always remember both honesty (so you do not lead people on) and kindness (for obvious reasons), maybe it doesn’t end up that badly. This doesn’t mean that you date people for the sole purpose of breaking up with them, though that would be interesting. It’s just that being interested in a relationship may be enough of a reason to pursue it without certainty that it will work out.
Of course, this is largely theoretical for me, as further postings will make obvious. Stephen was my last boyfriend as well as my first. Yes, fear of hurting someone based on that experience was a lingering issue as I started junior high, but once there I acquired much worse ones.
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