When I was a sophomore, I had a terrible, gut-wrenching crush on one of the seniors. He, naturally, didn’t know I existed. In part because - as I learned later - he was involved with my mother.
I don’t know what became of him. It sort of put me off crushes, though. Y’know?
Ouch.
There was this one guy, let’s call him Mike who was in about half of my classes freshman year of high school. He was one of the most beautiful guys I had ever seen. I was always the shy girl who pined after unattainable guys, but this time I was about to get lucky.
Our relationship started with a trip to the library to do research for a big project that was due at the end of the semester. We bumped into each other and talked a bit. Turned out that he lived near me, so we decided to walk home together. And just my luck that it started raining as we were walking. Neither of us had umbrellas so we walked through the pouring rain and got soaked in the process. I had a sweatshirt with a hood, but I decided not to wear it. He noticed this and asked:
“Why aren’t you wearing your hood? It’s raining pretty hard.”
I responded with: “If you don’t have a hood, then why should wear mine?”
My response got a smile from him that nearly stopped my breathing. Man was he hot.
We ended up talking on the phone for a couple of months and he asked me out. Of course this ended in a few months since high school kids are usually dumb and treat each other badly because they don’t know what they’re doing. But he was my first love, and I couldn’t stop thinking about him for about 3 years, always had the what-ifs in my head.
Well my senior year, I was sitting on a bench near my house, waiting for the bus to get to work when I hear someone skateboarding near me. It was Mike. We hadn’t talked since we broke up, but he said hi and sat down next to me. He apologized for being such an asshole to me while we were going out and was wondering what I was up to. I’m really glad that we got to talk because for about three years, I always thought about what I would say to him and what I would feel (I always pictured me saying something clever and making him want me back or something to that effect). When we were actually there, we chatted a bit, and to my utter delight, I didn’t feel that longing for him anymore. He was just a guy that I cared about from a long time ago.
We parted ways and I haven’t seen him for about four years since that encounter. I still wonder what he’s up to, but I don’t wonder if he was ‘the one’ (when you fall for your first love, you fall hard) anymore. I hope he’s happy with someone who really makes him happy.
I got back my “one that got away” after 11 years!
I had a crush on “A” throughout our junior and senior years. Finally, at the end of our senior year, we started dating. We graduated together and spent a wonderful summer together. We were so much in love. Then, I went away to college and he joined the Air Force. We stayed in touch and wrote letters for a while, but eventually we lost touch.
That was over 11 years ago. Throughout the years I have often thought about him and never stopped loving him. I have tried to find him before with no luck. Recently, I had a dream about him one night and I Googled him the next day, and lo and behold, I found him!
I e-mailed him and we started talking and before we knew it, we were in love again. However, he lives in California and I live in Virginia. So has flown out to see me twice, and both visits were magical! I have never been so much in love. I am visiting him in CA in a few weeks.
He is going to transfer here as soon as possible and we’re going to live together. I think it’s likely we’ll get married! He is my soul mate, and he told me I was his. We talk every day and we miss each other terribly.
He’s a musician and he’s written me several songs. One of them is called “The One That Got Away.” He said he’s always considered me to be the one that got away, and I considered him that too. But fortunately, we found each other again after 11 years. Oh yeah, he wrote another song for me called “11 years,” about how much he had missed me in the time we’d been apart.
I blew two my first year of university. Actually, not even the first year–the first semester. I’d been dating long-distance during my last year of high school. Frankly, it sucked–I wanted a boy who was around more than once a year (when he asked me out, he said he might be moving nearby, but he didn’t). At the end of the summer, I told him ai thought we should see other peopl–not a break-up in my mind (though as I found out a bit too late, he thought so).
Anyway, fast forward to university. Guys! Some of whom are actually cute! And not jerks! Yippee! If you can just forget the 2-1 girl/guy ratio…Back to the story, I got crushes on two guy friends. At this point, I was saying “I have a BF but I’m open to dating other people.” One guy took this as a ‘hands-off’ signal. He started dating someone else. Fortunately, that crush has worn off so I don’t regret it (Unfortunately, he will flirt with every girl on campus, including me–he’s pissed off several of my friends this way). The other guy–don’t know what happened with him, but he also found another girl to date. Only, my feelings towards him haven’t worn off yet, and it’s been over a year. Yeah, it sucks.
Have you ever seen the show “Yes, Dear?”
If so, do you know the character named Michelle?
If you do, then you have seen the girl who, from eighth grade through twelfth, was the absolutely unattainable object of my desire. I had a hard time even looking at her, so fiercely did the coal of lust she inspired burn inside me.
Her name was Liza and she was voted “Best Looking” our senior year.
Of course, I married someone else, and I am a very happy man. I still don’t understand the madness that posessed me back then. I see her now and feel nothing, but if I cast back in my memory and see her as she was in Junior High and High School, I can almost feel that dry-mouthed, fidgety, jump-out-of-my-skin discomfort again. Weird.
Alex. I know he liked me but his being a bit of a bad boy and me a very good Catholic girl, I would only see him at school. We did our audition peice together for the Spring musical, my Fiona to his Tommy, and that was my first real kiss. Then the principal’s daughter, all 38DDs, moved in on him and although he always said Hi, he was gone.
Alex dropped out his Senior year, DD and my Junior. Come Fall, she had gained a ton of weight but participated in the local beauty pageant anyway. My mother commented that her folks must be blind. She never came back to school. Her parents shipped her down south to have her baby and live with relatives. Alex went and got her, she delivered in our hometown, her parents disowned her, they had 2 more in 3 years and she left him. I ran into him at KMart and he was drunk and I just said Hi and Bye.
Feh. I have enough of these to completely fill up the page. Seemed like in high school I constantly had a crush on one girl or another. However, more of them were at other schools than my own, because I took part in a lot of inter-scholastic activities.
If I had to pick one, however, it’d have to be A., who actually did go to my school. She first appeared to me sometime during my sophomore year, her being a year younger and having spent the prior 8 years in Catholic school. She was an adept musician, playing trumpet and sax in the band, and horn in a local youth orchestra in which I played violin. I don’t even remember how we met, but for the next three years we had a definite “When Harry Met Sally” thing going on. We’d hang out, be best friends, talk to each other about our respective crushes, get on each others nerves, stop talking, then make up. We tried to set each other up with our respective friends, usually failing miserably. Maybe it was because the friends thought the two of us deserved to be together. I was always too chicken to confess how I felt about her, because she was one who firmly believed “you shouldn’t date your friends.”
Eventually, of course, I had to graduate and go to college. We kept in touch a bit, but I got a girlfriend, we broke up, and coming home for Christmas that year I decided I was finally going to confess how I felt. I can still remember sitting in my mom’s car, parked on a hillside overlooking the town, and A. holding my hand as she told me she’d always care for me … but as a friend.
The next fall she went off to college too, and we could only keep in touch via e-mail. She told me about meeting and falling in love with a trombone player at her school. I came home that Thanksgiving, different girlfriend in tow, hoping that the four of us could hang out, free of regret. A’s boyfriend didn’t come home with her that weekend, so it was just the three of us who went out for a movie, Star Trek: First Contact (yeah, shut up :p). Afterwards, A. hugged me, told me how much she liked my girlfriend, and drove home. I never saw her again after that. That girlfriend and I broke up a few months after that, too.
A few years later my mom and I ran into a friend of A’s at the mall, who told us A. had gotten engaged to that guy. I don’t know what became of her or them since, but a few months ago, I did a Google search on her (maiden) name and found a match, a music teacher at a school in the Las Vegas area. She has a pretty distinctive name, but I doubt anything would be served by me trying to contact her again, almost 10 years after high school.
I was a high school sophomore and he was a college sophomore all worldly and funny. Tall, skinny, dark hair, with a dorky guffaw. He taught music in a summer theatre program I joined. I was the newbie who laughed at all his lame jokes. Who knew Brigadoon songs were the “Informer” (lame 90’s pop tune) of their day?
His rehearsals were my favorite and he gave me several solos for the show which meant more one on one rehearsal time. He was incredibly sweet and complimentary. After a performance he told me “No matter what the cast is singing, I can hear your voice. If everyone could sing like you, we’d be perfect musically.”
But he was completely out of my league and is probably married now. Still, thinking about him makes my heart flutter. Thanks to his encouragement, I became music director of the summer theatre program. Sigh…
Great time to tell this story…as of this morning I’m single again (no trauma) and I’ve been reminiscing.
My “one that got away” didn’t happen until after I got divorced. Back in 1991, I went back to school for my MBA. I met a woman in my classes (Linda). Now, at the time that’s all it amounted to - we were classmates, acquaintances, casual friends. I was married at the time. We graduated and I didn’t see her again for a very long time.
A few years go by, and my wife comes home from work and asks me if I know someone named “Linda V.” Linda had just started working at the same company as my wife. Saw her at the office Christmas party and we got caught up…still, no relationship, just friends. She married a doctor, who ultimately turned out to be a drug abuser and a major head case to boot. Eventually she divorced him, and left the company my wife worked for.
Fast forward a few more years…now I’m divorced. As I’m wondering what the hell I’m going to do, romantical-wise, and wondering how one gets back in the so-called dating pool as middle age rears its hoary salt-and-pepper head, I think of Linda. In a sort of who-could-I-call-if-I want-to-go-to-dinner kind of way. I even looked up her phone number on the Internet, but I never called.
Another month or so passes. I come home from work and there’s a message from her on my answering machine…“Ummmm…hi…this is Linda. I saw Jane (my ex-wife) downtown and she told me about the divorce…so…y’know…if you’d like to get together sometime…call me…and I guess…we’ll just take it from there…” Very nervous.
So I called.
Now, I have to describe her: She’s tall, blond, and extremely striking…not what you’d call beautiful, but a real attention getter. She’s got incredible presence. She’s a professional concert violinist, she teaches violin, she’s performed in Europe and with major talent She has a doctorate in Organizational Behavior. She speaks 4 languages. She has a wicked sense of humor. She also enjoys hitting the kinky sex shops in the city with her gay friends. She blows off steam by taking her Glock to the range. She plays classical music but likes Metallica. One night while hanging around her apartment with a little Mahler (or something…how the hell would I know?) playing, she says, “That’s enough of this shit.”, and puts on Barry White.
She’s the absolute sexiest, most fascinating woman I’ve ever met. And completely out of my league.
We gave it a shot…I think it lasted 6 months, and we broke up by mutual agreement, with no animosity. We’ve remained friends…we just didn’t work very well as lovers. Not that we didn’t love each other…and I told her the night we broke up, “I will always be in love with you.” It was a mushy, tearful, Bad Romance Movie ending.
And that’s The One That Got Away (or, more accurately, The One I Let Go).
EPILOGUE: Two weeks ago, I found out she got married (and converted to Judaism, which was more of a surprise than the marriage). She also let me know that I had inadvertently called her number on New Years Eve and left a slightly incoherent message for someone else…just happend to be the adjacent number in the speed-dial list.
Did a search. Is this her?
Never saw that show. IMDB says the character’s name is Christine, but the Actress name is Liza Snyder? So you went to high school with her?
I had so many crushes in high school, it’s pathetic.
If i had to choose one, though, I’d say that it was Joey.
I first met him, I was in the seventh grade, and he was in the eighth, it was marching band camp (no, we didn’t do THAT). I thought he was cute at first sight. For years and YEARS (until my senior year, while he was away at college), I had an enourmous crush on him. My friends constantly tried to hook us up, always to no avail. My junior year, he went to the prom with one of my close friends. That one hurt. I always thought deep down that we were meant to be together…but alas, we weren’t.
I ended up going to the same college as him. He’s a jerk. Honestly, he’s really stuck up and rude. I’m glad that I never ended up going out with him.
I still see him often, and we’re cordial, friendly even. I’m just glad that I found my first boyfriend here, which is funny because everyone had assumed that I followed Joey here, but in reality, I found love from a completely different source, at the same institution.
There were two. But really, any guy that looked at me and said ‘Hi’ I was in love with that week.
But the OTGA was Mike. Nice, smart, dependable solid guy who talked to me as a person instead of whatever, y’know. I missed the signs that he was interested in me because I was so fooking clueless. This is a pattern in my life early on. I googled him for years and have always come up dry, which is interesting as his father is a big professor in the area and periodically on the news. When our reunions have come, I haven’t gone, but I like reading the updates, which he has never done. I figured he was a bank teller some where or soemthing.
Nope.
He is in the Navy, Submarine work…a commander or near commander level and has three kids. He is skinnier now than in high school (an injury kept him on the sidelines to football and he probably put on weight) but I am so very happy for him.
The other guy was Captian of the football team, graduated #1 in class, got the best scholarships, had a hot car. You know, the cliche. He was so smart and so out of my class and the only thing I beat him in was the fact that my last name was alphabetically before his. I adore this guy for years and the fact is is it was based on his looks. He was a bit of a prick, but tell that to my teenage brain. In my alumi paper/web sight, I found out he’s married with 4 kids and really balding. At least the navy guy kept his hair. 
Correct. Yes, the character’s name is Christine. I accidentally put down Michelle because that was the character she played in the movie Pay it Forward.
We were in the same grade and went to the same Jr. High and High School.
I used to have a friend in highschool who none of the girls liked but I just adored because he was tall, handsome and wacky as hell with a seriously dumb sense of humour. That’s the kind of thing that turns off a lot of younger women. Anyway, we always seemed to be stuck together and I am the type who always winds up sitting next to someone attractive and then sitting too close and by the end of highschool I was always practically sitting on this guy’s lap. He just attracted me. So finally I admitted it to my friends. They all supported it because he was adorable if not everyone’s idea of a pin-up. Let’s call him Grover. Well…
Around graduation I was all set to make my big move on this guy. BUT, I also kind of liked a popular guy we’ll call Dirk the Jerk. I also liked a smart, handsome guy we’ll call Lance. So graduation time came around and everyone was amorous because of drinking combined with your last chance to be a highschool slut when there are only 3 weeks left in which to live with your trashed reputation. One drunken night, I was too drunk to organize my own tryst, and I asked my friends to go and find one of the three guys (Dirk the Jerk, Lance, or Grover) and bring him back for me. Due to bumbling on their part they brought back two: Dirk the Jerk and Lance. I won’t say how, but I sorted it out and was left with only Dirk. I really had been hoping for Grover. I left my fate in the hands of drunken young women with their own agendas and I wound up with someone else. I will never understand what game I was playing but I wound up going out with Dirk for the next 10 months. I took the path of least resistance. At the time, there was some kind of issue of not wanting to be rejected by anyone. I lived in paralysing fear of romantic rejection because I wasn’t that hot and I had a terrible outspoken personality and was known as a handful anyway. Ironically, I think that was why Grover liked me. Because he is they type of man who LIKES people like me and CAN YOU BELIEVE I LET HIM SLIP! What a rare GEM.
I made out with him hardcore one time too. It was at a school dance. I don’t know what happened we were just friends, we were drunk and we were dancing and I just felt really good. He got saliva all over my face. His mouth was really really big. We were super embarassed about it later. He was a total spaz too but he was so low-body-fat it was unbelievable. Tall, nice shoulders. I wonder if he still is? Hmmm. Well anyway.
Two weeks later my fate was somehow sealed with Dirk. When yearbook time came, Grover made it clear that he had wanted to get together with me and that if I ever wanted him I should call him. But I was tangled up with Dirk and his *insanity * for at least 10 months and by the time I got out of it Grover was moved and I don’t know where. I had his new number but I was still scared.
Sometimes now, 15 years later, I google Grover’s first name. No results at all! One time I even double checked the yearbook to see if I forgot the spelling but no, it is just that he is the only guy in the world with this name and he is not to be found. I guess his mom made the name up.
When I really think about it, he is a lot like the first boys I ever liked when I was little, and he is a lot like the two guys I have had longterm relationships with. I definitely have a type. But he was the one that got away. I am totally frustrated just thinking about it.
About six years ago, I went to a concert at a small club. (Years later, at this club, Moby would be jumped by a couple Eminem fans.) I’ve just moved to Boston, I don’t have anyone to go with, but I have one of this band’s CDs and I’ve been wanting to see them live. Going alone isn’t really a big deal.
The doors open, everyone files in, and I manage to stake out a good spot on the balcony. The show starts and it’s great. And about halfway through, I see a woman down on the main floor, stage right. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had red hair a few inches past her shoulders, and glasses; not exactly the classic, strikingly beautiful type. Maybe no one else would have been quite as thunderstruck as I was, which of course makes it that much more intense.
I spent the rest of the evening watching the band and watching her. Like a lot of the posters here, I was very awkward and shy in high school; but I’m taking longer than most to get over it. It’s more complicated than that. I can talk to anybody about anything, but I can’t talk to somebody about nothing. And I just had nothing to say to this woman. The show rocked, and when it was over I walked out of the club, got on the streetcar, and was mentally kicking myself all the way home.
I was talking to one of my friends on the phone a few days later, and described the whole thing to her. I was more angry at myself than she was. No way to fix the past, but I resolved at that moment that if I was ever in a similar situation again, I would speak up. I knew how completely dispiriting it was to stay quiet.
Two weeks later. I saw on the website of another musician I liked that he was giving a concert in Wellesley. I’d never been to that town at the time, figured there had to be a little community theater or something. No; when I got there I found out that the show was going to be in the front room of one of the sororities at Wellesley College. I got there pretty early; they’d cleared out all the furniture and set up a microphone stand and amp at one end of the room. I picked a good spot near the front and sat on the floor. The room filled up gradually, and of about 80 people I was one of five guys there. The opening act didn’t even use the mic, just found a clear spot in the center, played his guitar and sang. (He’s since gone on to some reknown in folk circles, I was lucky to see him when and how I did.)
During the break, I started talking to some of the people around me about other good music and concerts, and I mentioned the one I’d been to a couple weeks before. Someone a little bit behind me and to my left said that she’d been at that show. I turned and looked over my shoulder.
It was the same woman.
The main performer came out, and he was excellent, but all through it I am just wracking my brain to think of something to say to her. I had promised myself that I would, and that’s not something I take lightly. A fair amount of my self-respect is riding on what happens when the lights come back up, which still doesn’t answer the question of what to say.
I wish I could remember what I said, because whatever it was worked. Her name was Lilly. I got a phone number, too.
I also wish there was an end to this story as good as the beginning. I called her later that week, and we went to a movie on Friday. I took her to dinner the week after that. I was having the time of my life; she was also a little shy, funny and very smart. She was a student at the college, so she went out of town for a few weeks over the winter break. When she came back, we went out one more time and then next time I called her she said she didn’t want to see me anymore. Wouldn’t even say why.
I’ve seen you; no, he couldn’t.
I was in love with the same boy beginning in first grade - first grade!!. He was golden haired, always the center of attention, athletic, funny, the whole nine. I remember telling my mom we were going to get married some day…I told her this when i was 8 years old!!!
He lived just down the street from us and after school and all summer we hung around the same group of friends. Went to the same grade school and high school and my crush/obsession was pretty well known my most people, including him. We actually went on some dates–when we were juniors in HS he took me to the prom and we had a really nice time. He even told me he loved me once, but now I know he loved me as a friend and a sister, even. When I saw him at our 20-yr reunion, even though we are both now very happily married, my heart sorta skipped a beat. He will always have a special place…the golden haired boy.
I saw a recent photo of one of my high school crushes. Phew! Time is not kind to some of us. The cute is gone. 
My first crush was on a girl named Julie. She was the awesomest. She transferred to my high school in either my sophomore or junior year; I can’t remember. But we already had a circle of friends established, and she worked her way in. She was super-smart, and funny, one of the types who’s incredibly pretty but doesn’t make a big deal about it. She joined the cheerleading squad, but hung out with us nerds and made fun of how shallow the cheerleading squad was. I was in marching band, and I’d watch her from the stands and think how cool it was that she could hang out with the “cool kids” but still not want to.
She and I got to be pretty good friends, and everybody knew I had a mad crush on her except her, of course. I was the guy she confided in. About the guys she was crushing on. Like Brad, who I considered at the time to be one of my best friends. She’d go on about how there was just something about him that she couldn’t explain, and how she was worried that she was getting obsessed with him. And he knew that she was crushing on him and I was crushing on her, and he would make jokes about it constantly – she and I were both pretty nerdy, and pale-skinned, and he’d say stuff like, “Imagine if you two ever got together; your babies would be translucent!” (In retrospect, I realize that I was really attracted to him physically but her in every other regard, but I wasn’t able to piece it together at the time.)
I got her to tutor me in French, and secretly obsessed on her during every lesson. And I eventually worked up the nerve to ask her to the Prom, and she turned me down. That wouldn’t have been such a big deal if we didn’t eat lunch together every day. One day at lunch, she was complaining about how tough things were for her and ended with, “And on top of all that, nobody has asked me to the Prom!” Everybody else at the table knew that I’d already asked her, so everybody went dead silent. I had to remind her that, yeah, I’d asked her, and I felt terrible because she looked absolutely mortified. I hope I never see anyone look as embarrassed as she did then.
I’ve found letters that I wrote to her during college; I don’t even remember writing them. We maintained a pseudo-friendship after high school graduation, but eventually completely lost touch. I think she got married, had a couple of kids, and then divorced, but lost track of what happened to her after that.
Obviously, it never would’ve worked out, even if she had been interested. But it’s still important to me for a lot of reasons – it makes me wonder if she “knew” somehow, even before I did, and of course it’s the first time I ever looked at someone and thought, “I am totally in love with that person.” I obviously can’t relate to anyone who is still with his or her first love, and I have to wonder how it’s different. Now that I’ve finally seen what it’s like to be emotionally and physically attracted to the same person (Miller, in case I haven’t mentioned it recently), I can’t help but wonder if things would’ve turned out differently had I “caught on” in high school, or if I were just fated to go through all the confusion before I hit paydirt.
I’m going to be marrying mine in June 2006.
We met my junior year of high school and really connected, and we’ve been together ever since.
“The one that got away” might’ve been in middle school/early high school. He had a crush on me, and I never returned the feelings, though we’re great friends now.
