I realized that there’s still nothing under “Love,” so I decided I might as well rehash all the stunted and failed romantic experiences of my life, in other words, all of the romantic experiences in my life.
The earliest entanglement of any significance that I can remember was the off-and-on, long-standing crush I had on a good friend of mine from elementary school until…well, present I guess, though it’s not active now. He’s basically a safe fallback crush.
I was pretty antisocial in elementary school. During recess I would make up complicated arithmetic problems and solve them. I remember he would often hang out with me working on similar projects.
In middle school I had a huge crush on a very popular boy who probably spoke, cumulatively, about two sentences to me. He played the violin in the school orchestra where I played the viola, and I believe we had a few classes together too. I basically liked him because he was an attractive boy and a good violinist.
In seventh grade I also liked a (much more intelligent) boy who was in my alegbra class and my SPIRAL class. I can’t for the life of me remember what SPIRAL stands for, but it was the gifted/talented program in my school district and SPIRAL class was a three hour english and history block. So basically, I got to see this boy a lot. I remember watching the muscles in his arm ripple as he drummed his fingers on the desk. Mmmm.
In eighth grade I had one of those “almost boyfriends” that are pretty typical of eighth graders, or at least eighth-graders in the fifties. When I went to middle school, the really popular girls were already giving the really popular boys head in the school restrooms. Guess I missed the boat on that one.
In ninth grade I had virtually no romantic activity, despite the fact that I was probably at my cutest in ninth and tenth grade. The summer after ninth grade I went on a cruise with two of my friends from middle school. On the last night of the cruise, there was a big dance party and I ended up making out with a guy from LSU. I was fifteen and I’m guessing he was 21 or 22. That was my first real kiss. Charming.
Tenth grade was another big romantic dry spell. I went on a trip to Costa Rica, and I was hoping for a fling on that trip, but nothing happened. It did make me realize that I wanted to date someone, so I started working on that at the beginning of my junior year.
The fall of my junior year I had a brief relationship with a guy who is a really good friend to me now, so I won’t go into detail here.
Senior year of high school was another big romantic dry spell.
And then I went to college. And I’ll be fair to everyone in my life and stop right here.
Do you know? My first one is on 21 years old. :))