Dating -- Things people have done to make you feel small

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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It has been my observation that people who think the best years of their life were in high school are generally correct; they are never able to top that particular social success, and it all vanishes upon graduation.

Social success among a bunch of pubescents is a fairly meagre goal, after all, and the traits it requires are rarely those that lead to a fulfilling and interesting adult life. Conversely, adolescent social circles often punish those traits that lead to a worthwhile adulthood.

(The exceptions seem to be those rare individuals who were popular in high school for the right reasons - not because they manipulated teenage politics well, but because they were intelligent, personable, and genuinely kind.)

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…not, I hasten to point out, that being intelligent, personable, and kind necessarily led to popularity – indeed, any of those could be the most abominated social sins.

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I don’t have any high school horror dating stories because everyone, including me, at school knew it would be social death to date me. I liked geeks then but we all knew in an unspoken way that even they couldn’t possibly be seen dating me. No one tried to fake me out, it just wouldn’t have been plausible.

Yup. Took a while for me to understand that people could be attracted to me. What were my terrible crimes that no one could possibly date me? I honestly couldn’t tell you now. All that mattered was that there was a pecking order and I was somewhere right near the bottom of it. I guess I was luckier than the girl who got her hair set on fire on the school-bus.

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Fortunately, I don’t really have any horror stories. Oh, I was completely shunned by all males my entire school career, and as far as I know, nobody ever had a crush on me or wanted to go out with me. I am fortunate in that I started seeing Jaime when I was 16, so I didn’t really have any pressure to find a boyfriend in school…

But when I was 15 I met a nice young man named Nick. The middle school was small enough that I was always aware of Nick, but he was two year’s older than me, so obviously, we didn’t move in the same circles. However, I was on the mock trial team, and so was he. As luck would have it, he was “my attorney.” That is, I played a witness for the trial, and he would be the one leading my direct examination. This meant we spent a lot of time together and I. Fell. In. Love. He was good looking (not cute, his face was too angular for that), he had a great sense of humor, he was freaking brilliant, and I just loved being around him.

So I basked in his brilliance throughout the mock trial season (I’m very bitter about that experience for other reasons. We had the highest points won in the entire state of Utah but due to a technicality I never understood, we couldn’t go to the semi-finals). But after our competitions were over, we never had any reason to spend time together. I missed him terribly, so I did something I never did before. I got up the courage to write a letter to him, asking him if he’d like to go out or something, and slip it into his locker.

Well, I wait and wait and wait for a response. Finally I ask a mutual friend if he ever got it and she said “Yeah, he put his response in your locker.” I told her I never got it.

So what do I find the next day in my locker? A letter written on butcher paper. It’s HUGE. It’s like a poster. And it amounts to “haha, no way loser.”

I don’t know why, but the fact that he wrote it on HUGE paper with HUGE letters really added insult to injury.

The next time we were on a mock trial team together, I was with Jaime. He took one look at Nick and said “That’s the guy?” Like he couldn’t believe anybody like me would ever like anybody like him. But you know, right up until the time Jaime told me he had feelings for me, I was still trying to figure out ways to get Nick. Cuz I’m pathetic like that (and also, I naturally assumed that Jaime would turn me down flat if I told him I wanted to have a relationship with him. I had no reason to believe he would be any different from anybody else, but he obviously was very different).

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BTW, Nick was in middle school with me when I was 15 and he was 17 because the freshmen were in our middle school (7-9) and I was the oldest person in my grade and he was one of the youngest (if not the youngest) person in his grade.

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I notice most people’s stories occur in high school. I was 25, perhaps incredibly naive or going through a rough patch (I suspect the latter-I had a six-year relationship end and it took a while to get over), and a guy started pursuing me pretty consistently. He was outrageously funny, original, and an artist so we became good friends, although I never thought of him romantically.

After about five months of friendship he tells me that he’s fallen in love with me and thinks we would be good together. I let him know I’m not quite over the hump, and although by this time I appreciate his support in my life, I do the noble thing and suggest we not see each other for a while so he can get over it. He refuses. Three months and one fateful bottle of wine later, the relationship changes gears and becomes romantic. We have two months of a superlative relationship, in every respect: He is mentally challenging, emotionally supportive and physically amazing.

Two months later, after eight months doing nothing but affirming my greatness, he tells me in a Target parking lot that he feels we shouldn’t see each other anymore. I has told him the week previous I had feelings for him. I later find out he had a woman on the side.

I still don’t get it. :confused:

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My wost story comes from about fifth grade. I was the class geek/fat girl/shy kid. So I was of course quite suspicious when my so called “friends” decided to tell me, after much whispering amongst themselves, that the boy I’d always had a soft spot for, B, had a crush on me. According to them, he had told D after school one day. I stupidly decided to believe them, because they were my friends, and I so wanted it to be true

So along comes every Fifth grader’s favourite day, the day we get to go to the local lake for a day of swimming. I was less than excited, being nervous about having to wear my bathing suit all day, but was jazzed to spend time with my classmates. On the bus ride there the girls were “passing along messages” and telling me how B wanted to take me to a movie that weekend. I was in heaven, but being shy, I still wouldn’t talk to him.

Once we got to the resevior, the water fun began. Most of the guys had brought water guns, and had filled them up and most were shooting at each other. Except of course, B, who came straight at me, shooting the whole time. It became quickly obvious that this was not the actions of someone who had a crush on me. One of the girls later took pity on me and told me B and D had come up with this briliant plan one afternoon, while they were making out behind the school.

Not the most traumatizing thing on here, but it still affects my self confidence. :frowning:

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When I was about 13, I got an English teacher who decided we had to sit boy-girl. (The tables could fit 2 people.) I ended up getting on well with the guy I was told to sit next to. After a couple of months I developed a crush. Eventually, I got up the courage to ask him out. He wasn’t horrible about it, but he did turn me down. At least I thought he hadn’t been horrible about it. But he went and told all his friends, who took great delight in mentioning it whenever they saw me around school.

It’s no where near as bad as what’s happened to some of you though. :frowning:

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Yeah, I know what you mean.

I’m 31 years old now. I’ve had long-term relationships, I’ve had plenty of successful dates, I’ve had the experience of being with people who truly liked–some even loved–and valued me.

But still, I find that when I meet someone I’m attracted to, my first thoughts are of self-preservation. Somehow, somewhere in the back of my mind, whenever someone I like is interested in me, I steel myself to hear “psych!”

Sad, I know.

I swear–if ever I have kids, they are not going through the regular old regimented march through the ranks of public school. Ever.

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Amen to that!

I’m 41 years old. Only now, after years of struggle, am I getting to the point where, on good days, I can actually see that I might have worth and that I might have a chance in the dating game.

I suppose it’s for the best that I’ll never have kids. I wouldn’t want to subject them to the hell that I went through.

The events described in the linked page are more severe than I went through… but not enormously more severe. The difference is of intensity rather than kind.

By the middle of high school I had found something of a niche as an outcast, and overt bullying had stopped. But the damage to my self-perception was already done. Ten years of bullying, shame, and ridicule had done their work.

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That sounds like me – pretty much invisible in high school. Didn’t really fit in that well with any crowd.

I don’t have anything as bad or detrimental as some of the other tales here. But… there was a former girlfriend (call her X), who I dated for two years (in my early 20’s). Her previous boyfriend was in the military, and had just come back from being stationed overseas. She wanted to visit him, since they still maintained a friendship – and assured me over and over that they were just friends, and that she wouldn’t ever see him as anything but that – that I had absolutely nothing to worry about… (cue ominous foreshadowing music). Silly, trusting me…

Maybe a week or two after Valentines Day (and not too long after her visit either), she was over at my place. I thought we were having a nice evening together, and I had cooked her dinner. Then she pulls the “we need to talk”. Nice timing, huh? It was kind of a sudden blow at the time.

And I find out much later on that on her visit, she told the ex why she broke up with him – had to do with his controlling mom (and him always giving in to her). So now that he knows, he decided to confront mom, and all of a sudden he’s X’s ideal again (which seemed to change a lot based on whether she was able to change the guy she was with or not). She ended up moving out to live with him and then marrying him within the year. I predicted that marriage wouldn’t last, and it didn’t. As soon as she found something she couldn’t change about him, no doubt.

He did me a favor, though. Staying with her would have been a really bad choice.

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:: raises hand ::

Hi, my name is Scarlett, and I was The Class Dork™ from second grade through high school. Dating (Ha! As if) was simply a non-entity in my life. I would rather ram a red-hot poker through my skull than relive my school days . . .

Anyway, among all of my dorky (and miserably failed) attempts to fit in, and the torment inflicted on me by the class Mean Girls, I had one moment of clarity. One day in 8th-grade gym class, the last two girls to leave the locker room before class were me and a girl who was sort of on the fringe of the Mean Girl brigade. She herself had never tormented me, but she was close buds with those who did. She told me that one of the guys who was also on the fringe of the popular clique “liked” me. To this day I am amazed that I wisely said to her something along the lines of “Nice try” and “Leave me alone.” I’m quite sure it was an attempt to humiliate two people for the price of one, as he seemed to be rather a quiet type; wouldn’t it be funny to get Dork Girl falling all over him?

Yeah, what a shame that I passed on the 20-year class reunion last summer. I’m sure they all missed me . . . :rolleyes: Ah well. They say that living well is the best revenge, and I sure got mine.

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Johnny, It’s Downhill From Here

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I was an ugly, awkward, geeky and nerdy teen, but somehow I was spared this sort of trauma - mostly I think because I was insulated by having, as a matter of fluke, lots of very supportive and nice friends of both sexes - we sort of existed outside the standard hierarchy of high school.

I didn’t really date much - I had shy little friendships with girls, where we were both too awkward to even hold hands - until the end of high school; but I didn’t feel deprived or neglected.

My wife, who is far more beautiful than I deserve, suffered intensely from the cruelty of her peers in high school, and still feels the effects today. :frowning:

The lesson: from what I can see, being geeky need not lead to suffering, nor being attractive lead to the reverse; it seems sort of cruelly random. If you are thrown among good people, all will be well no matter how fat, geeky, nerdy or unattractive you are; and if you are among evil people, they will crush your ego even if you are a beauty.

When you are young, it is all too easy to be moulded by the opinion of your peers; and the effects of this are hard to eradicate. I was lucky, I know now. When I left high school, I thought of myself as perhaps not the most physically attractive fellow out there, but this didn’t worry me much - because I thought I had other qualities which more than compensated. I was often flabbergasted at meeting people I thought perfectly lovely who had been convinced at school that they were hideous beyond redemption.

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Well, I’ve been reading this thread voraciously, and finally have to pipe up.

Me too. I wasn’t “one of the guys”, I wasn’t a girl, I was invisible, and for a long time the implicit assumption in our geeky crowd was that we were asexual beings who didn’t. date. Deep down I’m convinced I’m so homely that only good friends, not random strangers, could ever be attracted to me. But hey, I’m still in uni.–things will change, it did for all of you.

(Thread, don’t die!)

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I never really liked any of the guys in Catholic school, mostly because they could probably take a hin from Shallow Hal. Of course, then there was the new guy. At least he *seemed * intelligent…

Then came the school’s annual Halloween dance. Everything was going fine until the slow songs, when everyone, especially the SO-less, was pressured to dance. So the guys approach the girls, yadda yadda yadda, and he asks me to dance. Just as he does this, one of the “popular” guys chimes in with “Yeah, Mike, I’ll give you the five bucks afterwards.”, right in front of my face. Apparently, they had bet him five bucks he wouldn’t dance with me. Of course, not being one to take anything lying down, I demanded the same amount from said guy’s female counterpart (who had encouraged me to talk with the guy in the first place). :rolleyes: At least she had the decency to defend me, if only for the sake of her wallet.

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Stranger on a Train - no offense, but you seem convinced that no one will go out with you in the beginning - positive thoughts and all that can make a difference! Perhaps the girl looked back at you to get your attention - not to wonder about your motives! You could start with the photo thread :wink:

But, all in all, these are some of the cruelest and saddest things I 've ever heard…I simply cannot believe how cruel some people can be! :confused:

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I think I missed a couple of opportunities in school to go out with boys I really, really liked because I was afraid I was being the butt of a joke AGAIN.

Skinny, glasses, braces, brainy, with no money for the right clothes/hair/makeup. God, I love being grown up!

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Some of these stories… wow. I thought I had it bad in school, but I guess it could’ve been a lot worse. I’m really sorry some of you went through this. Good on you for surviving.

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Struck a chord with me. I feel the same way, usually. Doesn’t help that the last of my ‘single’ friends are finally finding their life mates, and my brothers are all celebrating new births in their respective families.

I, too, had the ‘bad’ experience dating in high school, but oddly it’s one I look back and laugh at.

A friend had introduced me to a girl three years my junior, and the two of us sort-of hit it off (only sort-of). We talked a lot on the phone, and towards the end of my senior year, she asked me who I was going to prom with. I told her that I hadn’t planned on going at all, and she told me that if I didn’t I’d REGRET IT THE REST OF MY LIFE!

Well, long story short, she convinced me to invite her. It wasn’t until an absolutely miserable prom (she spent all night varying between complaining that things weren’t good enough and ignoring me completely) had come and gone that I learned the truth: She really just wanted to be able to brag to her friends that a senior had invited her to prom. She didn’t care who it was; just as long as it happened, and she could regale her friends with it.

We never spoke again after that night, and somehow, I’m rather glad of it.