I had a best friend, a beautiful Gypsy Princess, a Hungarian Beauty. Consort, confidant, and the dedication and sad reminiscence of every redoubt of my favorite Hendrix tune, Gypsy Eyes. She held every ideal of mine réal. Hippy friends of every heady, youthful, grungy day. We were idealists and I worshipped her sense of compassion, practicality, and style. She loved me, I know it in my heart. My first great love. Not to be, I introduced her to my friend and she married he.
Wow, what a great thread! Usually I wind up skimming posts like these, but so far I’ve read every word of every one. 
I still think wistfully of…
Eric. The first guy I ever dated, my sophomore year of high school (he was a junior, but I think he was 2 years older than me). We went out a few times, but I was a late bloomer and wasn’t really into the kissing and stuff yet; I “bloomed” just a year later, but by then he’d transferred to a different school. Every now and then I still wonder how it would have been if my hormones had kicked in just a little sooner. <grin>
Jon. A friend of a friend who I’d met a few times before: we’d been out at a gay cabaret with a group of friends and were winding up the evening at the gay bar across the street. (We were all in our early 20s – I think 22 or 23.) Something got into our friend Kevin (who was gay), and he suddenly started french kissing everyone – apparently Jon (who was straight) liked the idea, and he started kissing everyone, too. I still remember how he tasted wonderfully of cranberries. When he finished his round, I was just drunk enough to ask him if he’d kiss me again. He did, and we kissed long enough to get yelled at by the bartender (“hey, this is a gay bar!”). We parted ways that night with each other’s phone numbers, and hooked up at his place a week or two later. I was feeling kind of emotionally defensive at the time, so even though we clicked pretty well I kept things on a strictly physical level and we only got together that one time. What can I say, I was stupid. To this day, if I notice an attractive man drinking cranberry juice at a bar I think about Jon.
Most recently was Chris. There have been a lot of guys named Chris in my life, some I’ve slept with and some I haven’t, but this is the only one I find myself still wondering “what if” about. We met via an on-line dating site at the end of 2004, and there was plenty of chemistry from our very first meeting. The first meeting and subsequent first date both ended with extended make-out sessions in parking lots, and I knew right away that I wanted to sleep with him even though I wasn’t sure yet if I wanted to keep dating him. The only thing that kept me from taking him home that second night was that it was “that time” for me (sometimes being a girl just sucks!). It was right before Thanksgiving: he shared custody of his 5-year-old daughter with his ex and he had some family coming into town, so after that second night he said he’d been in touch when things settled down. I said no problem, and told him flat out that the next date would end with us in bed – he seemed pretty enthusiastic about the idea. Well, a month went by with absolutely no word from him, and when I finally did hear from him it was an e-mail saying basically, “We don’t have anything in common, a relationship wouldn’t work, and while I think we’d have great sex it just wouldn’t be right.” All of that pretty much sealed the “I really don’t want to date this guy” deal for me, but, annoyingly, I thought he was right that we’d have great sex, and I still wanted to sleep with him! In fact, we’re still on the same dating site, and I still think about it sometimes when I see his profile…
There’s only one person for me who really qualifies in this category. His name was Josh. I’d noticed him around school (college), as he was so tall that he wasn’t easily overlooked. I took a seat in the second to last row of the lecture hall for marketing class, and he walked in a little after I did and sat behind me. Light brown hair, blue-green eyes, wonderful smile. I had a little crush on him before saying a word to him. He was just so cute–not particularly handsome, but the sort of cuddly type that I really liked. And he was funny. He had a very silly sense of humor. I would have loved to have asked him out, but was much too shy. He said a lot of things to me that would have been flirtatious, had I said them, but I’ve always had a hard time getting signals unless the sender comes right out and says something really obvious. The bad part is, by the time I realized that he was interested in me, I was hung up on someone else, and not inclined to pay attention to him.
Last I heard of him (I’m done with school, he graduates this semester), he was engaged.
:: sigh :: Memories…
In senior public school, there was Angela. I wasn’t interested in her, but she was in me, and even called me at home. I thought she was making fun of me (why not? Everyone else did when I tried to be social.) I politely declined interest. Later, my parents met her at grade-eight graduation and asked me, what was I thinking?
In highschool…
There was Kathy. Smart–a straight-A student. Japanese. Cheerleader. Long shining straight black hair. From grade 10 to graduation I was hopelessly in love with her, but knew I didn’t have a chance. Did get to do one physics lab with her, though; could barely concentrate on the equipment. I ran into her at the reunion for the 150th anniversary of the school, and actually said to her that she was my dream girl in high school. She thought that was cute.
Lisa. Also Japanese. Had her locker next to mine one year. Daughter of the regional government’s chief engineer (there’s at least one bridge in Whitby with his name on it). Lived in the next town over. I got to the pont where I phoned her on occaision; I used to ride my bike to the town line and use the phone booth just beyond, so that the call would be local (25c, no time limit), rather than long-distance (timed and expensive).
Colleen. Friendly, cute, down to earth. Joined the Navy on graduation.
Lystra. Brown-skinned, intriguing. The first South Asian person I ever met. I think she was older than most of the grade-13 class, and married. Sigh.
Then it was off to university, architecture school, where my world changed.
There was Jane, smart and attractive in a kind of classical Anglo way. For a long time, though, I was completely clueless to the fact that she already had a boyfriend, whom she eventually married. I met him and their daughter at Virgina’s wedding (see next paragraph).
Virginia. Chinese, very down to earth. Was going out with my best friend for quite some time before I knew it; but of course I hadn’t made a move because I wasn’t sure. They married, are successful, have beautiful kids, etc.
Elisabeth. Asian, petite, graceful. I didn’t have a chance.
Kathy. Dark straight hair, possibly Ukrainian ancestry. I was quite interested in her, but I blew up ah her when I found out she smoked. Even so, I had a party at my place in Whitby and she actually drove all the way out from Toronto.
And then there was Anna-Marie. Anna-Marie, the first woman I was strongly-attracted to, who I actually became friends with, and the greatest regret of my life. She had long dark-blonde often-braided hair, she was busty and of Scandinavian ancestry, and I was comfortable with her. She introduced me to the music of Kate Bush.
After three semesters, I left the university program to go to college and take up electronics, but we kept in touch. One summer a year later I went to visit her at her parents’ place, a vast old house downtown in the city where the university is. We met and I stayed overnight there. When she was showing me around the guest quarters, she actually invited me intio her bedroom and said, “You are one of the few men who have actually seen my bedroom.”
Later, just before I went to my room to sleep, I stopped her and started to say something to her. I was on the knife-edge of saying that I was very interested in her, and asking her would she be interested in a date, but I didn’t. The old fears and shames prevented me. In the morning, things were different, and we chatted, but there was no other chance.
We kept in touch. She met an old boyfriend and married and they had a daughter. For a time in the early nineties I saw them often. One day I went to their house and knocked; the door opened to reveal her husband, who (for some reason) I was totally not expecting, and the weird thing was, looking into his face, for an instant I thought I was seeing an alternate version of myself. I later found out that Anna-Marie and I would have been religiously-compatible, something I can say of very few people.
I still run into them on the subway on ocasion.
After leaving university, I went to electronics school.
There I met Thu, who was Vietnamese and beautiful in a not-terribly-delicate way. I actually met her in the Yorkdale bus station on the way to school; I’d been taking a summer course so I could get into second yeat. I looked around the waiting area and there whe was, the only other person in the concourse carrying the same electronics book I was.
We ended up in different classes.
Evelyn. I think she was Filipina. I gave her a card saying I was interested; she was not interested.
I graduated and got a job. Life changed yet again. I met the people who are currently my best friends. Work was where I begain to meet beautiful married women, like Rosa. I had different jobs and moved to different cities. At work in Mississauga I met Jessie, Liana, Kathy, and Rita. Rita ended up marrying my roommate.
With the exception of Anna-Marie (where I knew in my heart of hearts that I had chickened out at the crux), I had no idea what was going on, what social signals I was missing. Looking back, I can see that we had become friends first, and broken through the strangeness barrier that I sometimes think has isolated me.
For career reasons, at the age of 29, I decided to go back to school… art school. I moved again. It was odd, being significantly older than most of the people in my classs, but I managed to connect and make friends.
There I met Kris, who introduced me to neo-paganism and a lot of other good things. We were the oldest and youngest members of our social group, who were mostly animation students, with a few illustration and sculpture students. Kris and I actually connected and went together for four months. But though we connected physically and artistically, we did not truly agree intellectually, and there was no deep connection emotionally, something that I did not understand until much later. She said that she knew I was not ‘the one’, and I was fine with that. Eventually we went our separate ways.
At the same time, I was flaming out from the art program, and it took me a while to figure out what was going on. The prospect of a steady paycheck drew me back to a job in electronics, where I have been ever since.
I have met more interesting women at work, but if they are around my age, they are now pretty much all married, and if they are not married, such as the tall, gorgeous, brown-skinned Diane… they are a lot younger than me.
I have tried online dating, and meeting people through my other activities, but nothing has clicked.
On looking back, it seems my greatest social successes (and, frankly, happiness) were when I was living in an artistic world–animation or architecture–rather than in the electronics or corporate worlds. This only occurred to me tonight, and is food for thought as I look at my future.
Probably not as brief as the OP suggests, but…
My teen years were very traumatic in a rather weird way. I dropped out of college after my freshman year when I was 18 due to money (or lack of) and for about two years I very rarely saw or spoke to anybody near my own age. I lived in a very isolated crumbling haunted farmhouse where a typical day would be spent faking psychic visions or other things to try to keep my broke alcoholic bipolar mother from committing suicide, tending to the needs of a late 90 something aunt, fending off bill collectors, managing whatever scheme was keeping just enough money coming in to keep us in $.29 chicken leg quarters, keep a little kerosene in the space heaters and the Pekingese’s remaining eye safe, etc., and all of it living miles from neighbors and 40 miles from a town with anything like a gay community. When we finally did leave the farm (at the request and suggestion of the people who foreclosed on it) life was no less hectic, so while I knew I was gay when I moved to Montgomery (when I was 20) I had never voiced it aloud or acted on it because frankly I’d never had the time or the opportunity or even a reason to and there were plenty of other dramas and melodramas and absurdist comedies to occupy my time (e.g. my mother being arrested during Christmas week two years in a row [both times for reasons directly attributible to being dead broke], having to explain to an asshole judge that I had no money and no real responsibility to bury my dead exhibitionist aunt, major car wreck, etc.]).
SO, the month after I turned 21 I quit my job managing a home for the retarded and went to work as a bellman at a local hotel/conference center. That’s where I met Duane. He was cute though not in a stop-you-in-the-street sort of way, but more importantly he was brilliant. And debauched. Now, to understand why this was appealing- I grew up not so much sheltered as removed from anything other teens would consider sordid, so while kids my age (even in rural Alabama, which probably like most rural parts of the country is not as provincial as you might think when it comes to vices) were experimenting with sex, drugs and rock’n’roll I was listening to Julie Andrews sing Simple Joys of Maidenhood on the Hi-Fi and cleaning up Aunt Carrie’s pee-stains on the hall carpet (very quietly so she wouldn’t hear and get upset or defensive) and listening to my mother ramble drunkenly on about her lady wrestling days and filing the information away for use as a Ouija Board Revelation sometime later when she’d long since have forgotten ever mentioning it. I had had a couple of drinks by this time but I had never smoked pot or had sex and other than a brief fixation on The Monkees due to a crush on Davy Jones on reruns (which ended when I saw what he looked like in 1986] I had no knowledge of pop music.
When I started work at the hotel it took me weeks just to get racclimated to being around young people, and then Duane started. Here was somebody who had tried acid and cocaine and by 23 had already had sex with more partners than he could remember (still inconceivable to me) and grown up in a run down metro area in Michigan (odd, my first three almost boyfriends were all Michiganians), basically about as far from my past as you could get while still being a white English speaking male in your early 20s. And yet he was also a person who had actually read as much as I had and was the first person near my own age (2.5 years older) who actually knew exactly who Rasputin was or who the Sioux leaders were at Little Big Horn, etc., was just, and somebody who both had and appreciated a very quick and sometimes irreverent and often downright cruel and sick sense of humor- one that I’d always kept reined in before but now had a sparring partner for (nothing gives me a greater ‘high’ than making people sincerely laugh and here, for the first time in my life, was a guy that not only could I make him laugh until his sides hurt but I could use this secret arsenal of gross and twisted and absurd humor I’d never been able to share but a tiny part of with anybody) and he was cute and, I was pretty sure, gay, and whether he was or not he was the first person I fell head over heels in love with.
I also couldn’t stand him. He was a contemptuous asskisser to higher ups, and the only thing more damnable than a Uriah Heep’of’crap in the workplace being a successful Uriah Heep’of’crap in the workplace this was doubly damnable for the fact that the idiots who ran the hotel (into the ground eventually) fell for it and promoted him almost immediately to first bell captain and then a supervisory desk position over people infinitely more qualified and capable. He was at the same time rude to most people on equal or lesser footing, unethical in the way he split (or didn’t split) tips, could be totally dismissive of any conversation that didn’t center around him or one of his interests (e.g. he knew almost nothing of Alexander the Great or Brigham Young, two of my biographical obsessions at the time, so he’d always rudely change the subject to something he had the upper footing on- rock music or Howard Hughes or Hitler or whatever), generally violated every unwritten code of the “Dixie Bushido” system of ritualized etiquette I’ve mentioned in other threads and strangest of all he was something of a religious fanatic (?!). Nevertheless, we bonded in spite of ourselves, two people who were very different but both well read and lonely in a strange town, and after one incident involving an attack on him (at least partly justified, but only partly) by a crackhead co-worker he ended up being the first person I ever invited to my apartment and the first person I ever said, after he admitted the same, that “I’m gay” to. I couldn’t have been more smitten. I’d have followed him straight into if not Hell then at least one of the government subsidized neighborhoods of Purgatory and smiled at the privilege.
Now, I’ve usually been a chunky boy. At the time I probably weighed around 230-240, where I’ve stayed for most of my life, and so I assumed that it was my weight that kept him from taking any physical interest in me. Perhaps to some degree I was right, but nevertheless he opened doors and interests to me I’d never had: gay bars (Montgomery had two in those days- I think they’re down to one now, not sure), Hermann Göring (a biographical interest we both came to share), The Beatles (when I met him I’m not even sure I could have named all four of them, but soon I had almost all of their albums and honestly loved them), many others. And one night when I couldn’t contain myself and started to lean over and kiss him he told me he was HIV+. It was in fact the reason he was in Alabama; his mother, who was born on a teeninesy farm (here my own snobbery clicked in- he spoke of his “family farm” like it was some big deal when in fact it was 5 acres- I used to mow the grass on more than that when I was a kid as our farm was once well over 300 acres) left home when she was 15, spent the next forty years having children by every fourth man she met (five in all by as many fathers- Duane was illegitimate and there are lots of stories there as well as about his time in the army) and then returned to her tiny-town Alabama birthplace when her parents died and left her “the family farm” (hmmph), and Duane moved down when he learned of his HIV status because, essentially, he wanted his Mama, but soon realized he couldn’t live in Tiny Town so he moved to the nearest city of any size.
Anyway, this was 1988 when not nearly as much was known about HIV/AIDS and it was generally considered a death sentence that could be transmitted by everything from sex to watching the same Chevy Chase movie. It was a stunner. How honest he was I have no idea because boy could like with the alltime pathological greats but he told me several times that had I met him before he was infected I’d have probably been the love of his life and the one person who could make him settle down (I’ve no doubts as to the truth value of that in actuality but I do think there’s a chance he may have believed it). As it was he had sworn off sex with anybody due to his diagnosis, and instead we had a very close and upwardly fucked friendship that had many ups and downs that included my introduction to pot, an altercation with skinheads that was resolved by a drag queen and her 240 lb. muscles of steel Marine boyfriend, involved a night of vandalism in Montgomery’s ritziest neighborhood, Duane imitating Hitler by standing through the roof of my Yugo and waving as I drove 80 mph down the Interstate at 3 a.m. one night, lots and lots and lots and lots of convulsive laughter and occasional fights.
There were numerous endings, but the true beginning of them all was when I learned he had broken his celibacy. I later learned he wasn’t informing his tricks of his HIV status. His argumentation was to the effect of “They know it’s out there… they know to use protection… if they choose not to, then they either have it themselves or would get it somewhere…” and I accepted this because without him I wasn’t. Then he started dating a military guy who I met and liked- young, very sweet, Hispanic- and it totally personalized what he was doing and I couldn’t take it anymore and there was a HUGE fight in which I called him a murderer and… well, wadn’t purty. And then we reconciled, and fought again, and reconciled and fought again. And there was a night we slept together and did something that was incredibly passionate for something not to involve ejaculation- a very odd and to my knowledge unique sex substitute we repeated a couple of times. The last time we “broke up” it was over something that was so trivial it was unreal- it went from a casual comment on my part while my voice still quavered from a laugh we’d just shared to literally screaming at each other in under a minute and a fight (not an argument) in the parking lot a minute after that and Yugo skidmarks and the lot.
And it still wasn’t over. I ran into him at the party of somebody we didn’t know was a mutal acquaintance with his insanely jealous and stoned much younger boyfriend and that wasn’t pretty and it led to some awkward phone conversations that were conciliatory in nature until they were hostile. I’d occasionally see him when I was out and about, once getting a beer tossed at me as he physically retreated from a fucking evil but fucking brilliant comeback I made (too long a story to go into) and… well, it was just unhealthy all around. And while I could not rationalize his having unprotected sex given his HIV status, at the same time I did have to admit to myself I was legitimately sickened at the validity of his point: what the f*ck were these idiots who slept with a guy they just met in a bar thinking? I was a horny as hell 21 year old in those days and in love with the guy and I’d already bought the condoms before I ever made a move and… the whole inbred vapidity and pathetical nature of the bar scene, the married guys in the places, the trolls dressed in ludicrous Miami Vice fashions ogling 19 year olds… screw this. This isn’t who I am or who I want to be, I’m still gay and I’ll never be straight but I’ll just be celibate, and I went back into the closet for about seven years.
When I was thirty I met a thoroughly decent and wonderful person and returned to dating and came officially out of the closet and while it didn’t work out romantically the person (the not totally rabid truckdriver of various dispatches) is my closest friend and long ago eclipsed Duane in both my emotional attachment to him and the degree of intellectual stimulation he provides, and he’s an incomparably nicer and exponentially more compassionate person and at least as intelligent, far more consistent and non-hypocritical a person. And yet even when I was dating him and holding him and realizing how much I loved him (the little non-rabid trucker boy I mean) there was still something I missed about Duane the evil slacker genius junkie asshole, and the increasingly cruel sense of humor and the disagreements over the merits of Wendys that would turn into a major battle in which we both eviscorated the other in twelve words, there was something about the rawness and the passion of it even though there could never be sex that I missed and perhaps always will even though I don’t want it repeated. If I ever have another significant other I actually want boringly placid, but…
Whatever. Duane has since [Twice](And then Duane died. [URL=http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=333440). ]died twice and I wasn’t worth a damn for several days either time after hearing about it and I still oddly will find myself missing him for just a moment, then I move on and remember not everything has closure. And while we never had sex or even kissed I still consider him in many ways my first lover, but he wasn’t, so I’ll classify him as a could-have-been. And this has been a reminiscence but has blown the Briefly request to hell and back, so I humbly and sincerely beg pardon. Believe it or not I meant for it to be a paragraph but somehow… well, it isn’t, and since I’ve written this much (and deleted a lot more) I’ll hit send and others can skip it.
And then of course there was the married “straight” co-star last year. I’ll mention him since he’s just a sentence and a hyperlink.
Chuck: I was eleven, he was thirteen. I met him in a new and very very scary place. He had been there a while when I arrived. The other kids in our group were sixteen and seventeen. I was placed with the teenagers because I was too smart for the preteen group and he was placed with the teenagers becuase he was one, but neither one of us really belonged there. He started out when we were watching a movie. He told me I was pretty, but I was too scared to know how to respond. Nobody had ever flirted with me before. He told me the next day that I must be tired becuase I had been runnung through his dreams all night :p. He was completely serious. He gave me a starburst and I sat next to him for most of the day. I didn’t like him, exactly. I was actually sort of scared of him (I was scared of everything about that place) but by the following day, I was comforted by the idea of him being there, just so that I had someone close to my age. I got there that morning and he was sitting in the hall. He smiled at me and I went to sign in and went about my business waiting for him to show up. He never did.
Tim: Another one in Elementary school. Tim came around sixth grade. All the girls would tell me that he stared at me or that he liked me, but I was sure they were just making fun of me. Tim was like me- shy, quiet, kind of nerdy, and didn’t stand up for himself very well, and I was sure they were just making fun of both of us until one day one of the more powerful boys came up to me with Tim in tow. “This is the great Tim. He cannot tell a lie.” “I cannot tell a lie.” said Tim. “That’s nice.” I said. I wasn’t especially interested. “I’ll ask the great Tim a question” said the other boy. “Is this girl named Dorothy?” “yes.” “is she doing her math homework?” “yes.” “is Dorothy ugly?” Tim stopped. I looked up from my homework and looked at Tim and understood the game. The point was simply to tell me that I was ugly, under the guise of some great joke. But Tim wasn’t going to play anymore. “No. Dorothy’s not ugly.” he said, and walked away. The other boy went back to his friends and they turned their attention on Tim, laughing at him and calling him blind and teasing him for liking the little blonde geeky girl. Tim never spoke to me again.
Ben: he was three years older than I. We were in theatre together. Ben was the kind of guy everybody wants to be friends with. He was nice to everyone, but there were certain people he actually WANTED to be around and everybody wanted to be one of those people (if that makes any sense…) I was one of the lucky ones, I guess. We also danced at the same studio (again, he’d been there longer) and he choreographed a solo number for me on his own, presented it to the director of the studio, and then showed it to me, so I got to dance a solo in the studio show less than two months after joining the studio. He once told me that the prettiest girls in the entire world were the ones with naturally blonde hair and brown eyes and it was the first (and only, really…) time anyone has ever told me I was pretty that I believed it. He graduated and, although he came back to see me in the plays and stayed at the dance studio for a while, he eventually sort of outgrew high school and I haven’t heard from him in a while…
Greg: This one was like a bad teen movie. He was a sophomore and I was a freshman. He was the object of one of my best friends’ affections. After she obsessed over him for a while (spending English class writing me notes asking me if I thought he liked her, all those sorts of girl-with-crush things) I convinced her to ask him to the winter dance. She was afraid he had a date already, so I agreed to scope it out for her (because that’s the best friend’s job.) I went to talk to him, and after making a bit of small talk, he dropped his bomb. “I was wondering if you had a date already to the winter dance and if you didn’t, if you’d maybe want to go with me.” I sidestepped it by telling him that I didn’t plan on going to the dance at all, as I had a dance rehearsal that night (which was the truth) but that my best friend was lookng for a date and had been talking about him for quite a while. They ended up going to the dance together, but she decided she didn’t like him as much as she thought she had and they didn’t get together. I’ve always sort of wondered what would have happened if I had accepted his invitation (other than my friend being very upset with me)
Sunspace, you and I seem to share a lot of phobias from early on that stuck with us for too long. I was pretty much a loner in junior high and high school. How about you?
Here are mine:
Alexis - We started out friends, but I naively jerked her around for a while I had a hopless crush on someone else, but we stuck together for a while the THIRD time during our junior year. She was the first girl I made out and messed around with, but we never went farther than that. She was the first girl to whom I said, “I love you.” We both liked wallowing in our philosophical angst and teenage ideological debauchery, but she had a lot of guilt because she came from a pretty strict Catholic family. We were there for each other, but after a few months I got all needy and that drove her away. I wouldn’t let go and ended up alienating her so completely that we never spoke again. I hated her for what happened, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t have stayed friends.
Jess - Irish-Italian girl-next-door from Connecticut with curly red-brown hair that loves horses. I met her when I took my first course as a premed during the summer after my sophomore year in 2002. We teased each other a lot, and people told us how we made such a cute couple, but she was very friendly and outgoing. I figured I was nothing special to her. I told how I felt anyway on the last day of class, but only to get it off my chest. The next fall she came to visit me and my friends with a few of hers, and I acted like a jealous prick around this dude who eventually did become her boyfriend. We didn’t talk much after that, and I only met her once in person over the next two years while I was in a relationship with someone else. But last winter she set a friend of hers up with a friend of mine and I went out with them. I went with him on a weekend visit to see her and her friend, and we ended up hooking up. “I wanted this to happen tonight,” she told me. Later I asked her what we were, and she said that she wanted to “take it slow.” We talked on the phone pretty regularly for the next few months, but everything stopped after she finally came to visit again with some friends. One was a guy, and they were really, really close. So close that I thought it best to just take the hint.
Max - Petite, beautiful South African of Latvian Jewish descent and the first girl I loved. We met at a party set up by me and my friends in the fall of 2002. Her friend slipped me a piece of paper with her number on it as they left the party. I called to ask her out, and couldn’t hide that I was nervous, but she thought that was cute. We went out once, but couldn’t see each other again for over a month because of finals and winter break. After we got back, we went out for coffee and ended up cuddling on her bed until 5:00AM. She took me home with her for a few weeks the next summer, and she spent the next thanksgiving with my family. That summer I stayed in New Haven to take summer classes again while she had an internship in the city, and I visited her nearly every weekend.
We stayed together for nearly two years, but we started having problems as our senior year was drawing to a close. I said something stupid that I didn’t mean. I told her that I didn’t feel ready to move in together, but that was just false. I wanted to be with her, I just didn’t have anything set up immediately after graduation, while she had her career planned out and set up for the next two years at least. She got both paranoid and clingy, accusing me of not caring for her enough, for not making her “the center of my universe” (but she was!). Things came to a head when she all but wouldn’t talk to me at my sister’s wedding, and we split up for a while afterward. Things changed for both of us after we got back together, because I was tired of “reassuring” her. After graduation we drifted apart until we broke up in November 2004.
Sarah - Cute, bright-eyed creature from Orange County with bronze hair who loved daschunds and country music. Sarah was the first person to really break my heart. She was also the ex of a friend of mine (who isn’t any more because the two of us started dating), and in the class two years behind mine. She didn’t want anything serious at first, but changed her mind after a month. I lost my virginity to her, but she’d been around herself. About a month after that she changed her mind again, but didn’t tell me. She almost cheated on me, if not actually. She admitted that she’d acted distant on purpose. She pushed me away, but asked if we could still be friends. That means nothing because of what she did before breaking it off, and that’s why my final answer to her question will only be silence.
Man I sound bitter. 
There are only two I remember, so I s’pose they must’ve been the only two worth remembering.
Matt: Met him in college, friend-of-a-friend kind of thing. He was a manly sort of handsome, charismatic and smart but didn’t take himself too seriously. We’d go get fas food, then go to his house and watch these hilariously godawful Z-grade horror movies from the '70s and '60s. His bedroom door was covered in scrawled stream-of-consciousness writing – he’d gotten drunk late one night and started writing whatever came to mind with a marker. Poetry at 3am.
He must’ve known I was crazy about him – he must’ve, it wasn’t like I could have kept it hidden, or that I tried very hard. I thought that maybe, if he saw how much I adored him and how much I loved spending time with him, just maybe he’d feel the same. Maybe, just maybe. Matt never did ask me out, and last time I talked to him was January 2004. That phone number went dead when I tried calling a couple months later, and I sent him an email but never got a reply. When I think about him now, it hurts but it feels good, too.
Kevin: This guy was in Americorps with me. As soon as I saw him, I wanted him. A couple years older than me, from Washington State, I liked the way he looked. He had facial hair, I like that on a man. He was playing pool at the local bar, I flirted with him and asked him to dance (spectacularly bold for me, I can’t quite believe I had the nerve, but I wanted him so much). He danced one dance with me, the next day when I saw him again he smiled and said, “Hi there, beautiful.”
I sought him out a few times, just to chat or play poker, but he never came looking for me. I got caught up with work and life and told myself I gave up on him, but I didn’t, not really. A few months later he went back to WA and his old girlfriend, and I was broken-hearted, thinking, what right you got acting all sad? Not like he was ever your man, anyway. One of my friends gave me a photo she snapped of that night me and him danced, saying that she remembered I had the biggest crush on him. I still have it.
Me too. I’d been bullied such that I basically believed I was a worm, unworthy of anything, and so I eventually mostly gave up.
Of course, part of my problems were due to the fact that I really didn’t have much social skill. I didn’t know what to do, and I tended to freeze while trying to think things out. I wasn’t extremely ugly; I just felt that way. I tended to act powerlessly as well. And my later life, it’s been a bitch and a half to get past that (I had excellent help and guidance).
Women… I should also mention Beth. My age, petite, Anglo, creative, multilingual; an activist, traveller and writer. She was the first woman I ever had a real one-to-one same-level emotional relationship with; we battled as much as we enjoyed each other’s company; at times I feared and hated her. But (thanks to the help mentioned before), for the first time in my life I stood my ground in the face of someone else, and kept my own space. I learned that it is possible to keep a connection through storms; that argument is not always destruction, but can be comminucation; and that I can pass through fear and not only survive, but triumph.
We are still acquaintances, but I have no idea when I will run into her again. I miss her.
Wow. What wonderful stories. Some folks, it seems, have a lot that got away or might have been “that one”, but it feels like others are sharing the stories of some great loves lost, found or missed. This is great.
Julie. Everyone who falls for someone at 17 thinks they have it all figured out. I really did think so. I started to fall hard for her, while my supposed gf was away at college ( A year older than I ). I held off, not being a worm. The out of town gal and I were headed downhill and had been for months before I’d met Julie, but I couldn’t do it. And, I told her as much. We kissed once, and I can still smell her perfume. She was, in no order of significance, brillant stunning tall embodied of a deep voice and killer loud laugh big busted green eyed wickedly funny tall and soldi…and gone. I was firm in my resolve to not break things off till I saw g.f. face to face. So, we remained careful friends for a while, then drifted away. Never saw her again. Her moral compass, empathy, brains and passion for life were deeply alluring. I sure hope she found a guy who could keep up with her wit.
Leslie. I know you’re out there, wondering if the other shoe ever could have dropped. A fellow artist. Neurotic New Yorker. A true kindred spirit, we camped out at her place or my place on and off for years and stayed marginally dressed. But the fires smouldered…
Sandee. Fascinating gal. Drew me right in. She was from Vancouver, and from a very religious Jewish family. She left school before graduation and as near as I know, married an Orthodox Jew. We flirted with maybe being something but never really went there.
Anca. Incredible that I am writing this. A week ago, out of nowhere, I mentioned her ( unnamed ) to a female colleague who was wearing a silver pendant that reminded me of her. In college, she and I became very close and were falling in love in the slow and careful way that makes you think that there might really be something there. We chose other paths… but because I thought of her after 23 years, I searched and found her on the Net. Wrote a note, she wrote back. Said she remembered my name but not my face. ( this amused me. ). I wrote back and reminded her in a very sanitized way of the basics of the friendship. She did not respond. I guess it wasn’t a good memory for her… or, perhaps, a painful one and I didn’t realize it when I wrote her. Pity. We connected in many ways.
I know there are others, but it was so long ago…
Cartooniverse
p.s. Am I the only one reading this thread who wondered suddenly if their name would pop up in a post by a stranger Doper and they would realize that they know that person??
I was wondering about the inverse of that: that some Doper would be one of the women I mentioned, and would recognise herself…
Allison. I was 11, she was 12 - an older woman! :eek: I was camping in Sturgeon Bay Park, Point au Baril, Ontario with my mom and stepdad. She was in the next spot over with her parents. We spent one glorious week running around the woods at night, swimming, picking wild blueberries, trying to get her Speak N’ Spell to say strange words, playing Uno, arguing about the best way to roast marshmallows, laughing at the chipmunks stuffing their faces full of peanuts until their heads looked like they would fall off, all kinds of stuff. (None of that icky sex crap, that was gross back then. We held hands though.) But in the end, she had to go back to Toronto and I had to go back to San Francisco. We send a couple letters back and forth, but it trailed off.
Heidi. We were both freshmen and had a few classes together. She had pretty much all the stereotypical attributes you might think of when you hear the name Heidi, except she was also smart and witty and clearly had a thing for me, unkempt shaggy haired geekboy that I was. She practically threw herself at me, but with the onset of puberty I was too terrified and just sort of froze when she was around. Even before I moved to a different city, she got exasperated and moved on.
Sharon. My 10th grade biology teacher ran the school’s Discovery Club, which took students on various outdoor expeditions. I had seen Sharon around, but didn’t really know her until we both ended up on a 3 day hiking expedition in the Mono Lake area. I tried to ask her out several times, but she had a boyfriend and wasn’t having it. Still, we chatted a lot on the trail. Later, in senior year, she had broken up with that guy and I think was possibly interested in me, but I was busy being all angsty over some other girls and was still miffed that she didn’t go out with me earlier, so I didn’t respond. Yeah, I was stupid. I saw her once several years ago, with two kids in tow that she didn’t exactly look happy about having. She ended up marrying the son of a local restaurant owner.
Wendy. She was actually my girlfriend briefly, the only actual girlfriend I had in high school. We met on a different Discovery Club trip and hit it off at first, but I was kind of awkward and didn’t know what I was doing. She dumped me and hooked up with some guy that was on the track team with her. That was the first time my heart had been truly broken, so of course I cursed her name to the heavens and all that. Just before that we had gone to a school dance, and the last dance was that horrible “Save The Best For Last” by Vanessa Williams. For the longest time I couldn’t stand that evil, hateful, spiteful, horrible song, but then I stopped caring and then I heard the Me First And The Gimme Gimme’s version and it was good. Still don’t really care for the original though.
Stacy. I joined the school’s advanced choir largely because she was in it, although I suppose my status as the only true bass who actually auditioned and could carry a tune had something to do with my enrollment. She was a soprano; the class used to joke that between us and maybe a third person in the middle range we could cover all the notes on a piano. Of course all the other guys wanted her too, but she held us all off. She had a “boyfriend” in college, who actually did exist but who didn’t seem to be much more than a method for keeping us at bay. We got to be friends despite my having a total crush on her and her trying to politely get me to stop asking her out. I remember one evening on the phone she told me she felt lonely because other girls called her a bitch and a slut and stuff like that because of all the guys hanging around all the time. I felt bad for her and stopped bugging her so much after that - on the other hand I thought she probably enjoyed the attention to some degree. We kept in touch over the years, and she eventually married someone else and has a couple kids. The funny thing is she pretty much looks exactly the same as she did 12 years ago.
Lisa. I was 18 and had graduated, but not yet decided to go to college. In between working at McDonald’s and going to punk rock shows with my friend, I started hitting the BBSes all the damn time. I met Lisa in a chat room on one of the local BBSes that did pizza socials, then we eventually met in person over pizza. She was still in high school, played soccer, and was a total geek (you pretty much had to be a total geek to even know about the existence of BBSes, much less use one). We went out on a couple dates aside from the BBS events, and our characters in Legend of the Red Dragon got married and had a bunch of kids (which were only useful for inspiring a berzerker rage when they got killed), but there were two major obstacles to having more than a flirty relationship. One was that she lived kind of far from me, neither of us had cars, and public transportation took several hours as there were several different transit systems involved. The other was that her dad, upon hearing me on the phone calling for his daughter, refused to let me near her because he thought I was some creepy older man pretending to be a teenager with a deep voice. She snuck around a couple more times to see me, but eventually we both agreed that it just wasn’t going to work.
Delphine et Caroline- Two French sisters that made time stand still for me during two idyllic, Summer days on the banks of a cold, deep, mountain lake in the Northern wilderness of Greece. I met them swimming in Lake Kastoria, Macedonia on a Greek holiday as an exchange student. They were swimming and emerging from the cold black waters like an artemic vision as I walked onto the dock. Gourgeous, jet black hair, fair skinned, twin visions of unimaginable alpen beauty (They were from Courchavel, France in the French Alps.).
We managed to strike up a conversation in a melange of English mixed with French and German to bridge our tongues. We became good friends for an afternoon and morning and the oldest and most beautiful sister, Delphine took a liking to me and gave me a most memorable parting kiss. Delphine was 17, Caroline was 15, and there I was stuck in the middle at 16. Together the sisters also taught me the wonderfully sensual, traditional French greeting and parting custom of double and sometimes, triple lippy busses.
Delphine and I exchanged addresses and I got a couple of letters from her and wrote once, but between my first girlfriend, High School, work, and College I never did extend the relationship. I know that she very much wanted to come to the United States, from her writings and her many questions in Greece. Another incredible possibility that I let rot. Hugely foolish and regretful. She was a dream- such an infectiously happy, witty, and affectionate girl…and beautiful, imagine Jennifer Connelly meets Grace Kelly with that weird, healthy, alpine glow (all in a bikini, wwhew!).
Ironically, I just learned that Lake Kastoria means Beaver Lake…hehehe.
There was only one guy I went to school with that I know had a crush on me…his name was Dave. He came to my school when we were both around 9 years old, and back then I thought he was totally gross and cootie-infested. I’m sure the feeling was mutual. He liked to chase girls with various disgusting objects he’d found (dead bird’s feet, boogers, etc), and he kind of spit when he talked. By the time we were about 13 and puberty had set in, I noticed he seemed to go out of his way to give me compliments and gentle teasing. It was pretty apparent that he liked me when at the end of the 8th grade year he signed in my autograph book, “To you, Love (last name).” At that time I was way too shy to say anything, so nothing ever came of it. I started to like him a lot in grade 9, and by then worked up enough nerve to ask him out, but found out that unfortunately he had a girlfriend. He joined the wrestling team in highschool and put on some pretty nice muscles, which only made me crush on him more. Since then he was always with a girlfriend, and I kind of regret that I never took a chance with him.
Dead bird’s feet?