Well maybe, remember. As I said there’s some ambiguity there. The FB comment was
sort of as follows:
But as I said it was my brother in her class. It’s hard to imagine someone mixing up our given names–it’s not like it was one of those old fashioned schools where teachers and students called each other by their surnames, as in “Robinson! 500 lines! Stone, the same!”.
Who knows? I can’t believe my brother would have been oblivious to her, if she was interested. OTOH that’s the sort of thing that happened with me all the time.
The other part of the mystery, is why don’t I remember her at all? I’d certainly be interested to know where she saw me, if it was me. I can’t remember her in any classes whether seeing her at a desk or hearing the teacher naming her at roll call. On the other hand, when looking through the yearbook the other day, specifically at the candid shots scattered throughout, I was quite surprised I see somebody I recognized, and whose name I used to know, but have forgotten. There are also some people I know only by the German language names they chose for themselves in that class. (Starting in freshman year, most of us stuck with German and kept the same German names through the entire four years.) Not everybody, though; there are some of my fellow German students whose German names I don’t remember, but I do remember their real names.
In high school, I knew a young lady named Cynthia. She was quite attractive, and she certainly caught my eye. She was in a couple of classes with me, and she did know my circle of friends, though she didn’t hang out with us much.
Some years later, our circle of friends held a reunion, just for us, and Cynthia was invited. I caught up with her then. We chatted about what we’d done, and so forth. She’d gone to university, worked as something-or-other for Company X, and was married and pregnant. Just small talk such as you’d do in that situation.
But then, you could have knocked me over with a feather when she said, “I had this huge crush on you, Spoons, back in the day.”
There was a girl I was very friendly with in HS. I thought she was attractive but she was seeing this other guy who was a friend of mine, and they were widely regarded as completely inseparable. They were The Cute Couple of the school. After HS the girl went to university as did I, but her boyfriend did not. For various unromantic reasons I continued to see her around, largely just because our schedules co-incided, and she would mention the guy. I was interested in her but always assumed she was “taken”. They are still together, have children etc. 32 years later.
About 15 years after HS my wife and I had them round for dinner. We’d had a few drinks. We were discussing how long they’d been seeing one another, from HS onward. The girl (woman) mentioned that actually there were substantial periods when they had not been seeing one another, particularly around the time when she was at university. She looked me right in the eye in a very pointed way and said “I think there were guys who thought we were still together so they didn’t ask me out, but actually I was single and would have been quite interested.”
Not to hijack the thread, but the clear pattern is that if a girl has a crush on a guy but doesn’t make it known to him, it is a lose-lose for both sides. Is it much the same reason many men won’t initiate?
I once went bowling with a group of friends, guys and girls. Beforehand, one of my friends (a girl) told me Carly will be there.
Me: Who’s Carly?
Friend: You know, from (other high school).
Me: Oh ok, I don’t know her.
And leave it at that. So I meet Carly at bowling and she’s quite attractive. I said hello and whatever, but didn’t go out of my way to interact with her while we were bowling. You know, didn’t want to be *that *guy of the group.
Fast forward some time, not years, but quite some time later. I never saw or even heard of Carly again and one of my friend says, “Remember Carly? Can’t believe you didn’t like her.”
Me: From bowling? Yeah, she was cool. Why?
Friend: You never called her after that.
Me: Was I supposed to?
Friend: She had a crush on you for a while.
Me: How, I had never even seen her before?
Friend: Well she knew who you were and wanted to meet you. That’s why we set up the whole bowling thing.
Me: ???
Friend: Anyway she’s moved on and dating someone now.
And that’s pretty much how things go in high school. Some girl you don’t even know likes you and your friends, unbeknownst to you, set you up on a date that you don’t even know is a date. If I had realized the situation, I would have behaved differently at bowling and from there, who knows?
I could never tell when someone had a crush on me in junior high or high school. The sad thing is that I ever learned to unless she directly told me she was interested. Before I called up the woman I dated right before meeting my wife I asked a mutual friend if she was dating anyone. I find out she’s been interested for a long time. She told me the same thing when we started dating, and that she’d given signals. Later, it took me a while to see the “let’s break up” signals. My wife took the direct approach. Still, she would tell me that women were looking at me in a certain way (a couple of whom I’d had interest in before we met) and I totally didn’t see it.
We cleared up this question and I was indeed the one. I, myself, otherwise known as Captain Oblivious.
I still can’t place her at the time, however. As I said, I own the yearbook in which her senior portrait appears, but we all know how it is with senior portraits. Everyone looks so happy, relaxed, and relieved to be nearly done with high school that the photos don’t tell us much about what those people actually looked when we used to see them every day. For that you need underclassman photos, wherein nearly everybody looks painfully bored and trapped.
I do have an inkling, however. Ironically, if the woman mentioned in the OP was the same girl I’m remembering, we had one class in which she sat directly to my right–while my own crush sat directly in front of her. I’m sure this sort of thing happens more than most people realize.
There was actually a short-lived campaign to elect me as the King of the Junior Prom, because the girls all knew that I had never paid any attention to any of them, so everybody had an equal chance of being chosen as the Prom Queen. Rather than the guys who had shown interest in someone besides themselves, which reduced the chances from slim to none.
I went to my 25th reunion, and that was when I found out who I should have paid attention to in high school. Too late, dammit. The hottest milf in the room had been a 16-year-old gawky dork.
How were your Prom Kings/Queens chosen? Ours were elected separately. The ones I remember (senior year) were not dating each other - they had other dates at the prom, danced together, and that was that.
There was a girl who I learned a few years later has a crush on me. I thought of her as a platonic friend and she was a bit too wild for me. I also was only interested in a real relationship and she had issues. Still, I do regret I chickened out on asking her to the prom.
I think I’ll just pop in here every couple of days and repeat that I really don’t get it. This whole thread is weird to me.
Or, well, obviously I won’t, because that’s stupid and probably a warnable offense. So I’ll just do it this once, and try to say something slightly substantial.
If someone out there would have loved it if I had asked them out in college, it’s *their *problem. *They *had every opportunity to ask *me *out instead. Why sit around and wait for me to make a move? Or expect me to read their minds? This isn’t the fifties. It wasn’t the fifties when I was in college. And even if it had been the fifties when I was in college, I still don’t think I would get it.
Maybe it’s an age thing. I wasn’t in college all that ridiculously long ago, relatively speaking. Maybe it’s a cultural thing. I’m not in the U.S. But my impression of the U.S. is that women and men both have, or are expected to have, some level of agency and ability to take romantic initiative.
Well, my college days were 35 years ago, so it has been a while and I believe things are at least somewhat different now.
And yes, to a certain extent it is (or was) their problem. But it was also mine, because I was completely clueless to at least 4 women being interested in me during those years. 2 of whom I would have jumped at the chance to be closer to. Well, okay, I wouldn’t have turned down any of them, they were all good people I liked and was friendly with.
So that change is for the better, I suppose.