Your high school crush? (or "The one that got away")

In My Humble Opinion
41

Oh, I had a crush on this guy A. in high school. I wasn’t so much an uncool outcast as I was a freaky hipper-than-thou weirdo, and he was more preppy. He was absolutely freaking brilliant - and totally lazy. He was sarcastic and snarky and got 5s on all the AP tests and could have easily been valedictorian if he’d put forth any effort. We were on the Quiz Bowl team together. He had a girlfriend (who was also absurdly brilliant) for the last couple years in high school so I never took the crush seriously, but I remember when we were in 10th grade and we were passing around yearbooks in history and he came over to me from the other side of the room and asked me to sign his yearbook. No one else in my area, just me. Of course I was suspicious and thought he was mocking me in some way (I was not quite as self-possessed when I was 15 as I am now), but looking back on it, hindsight being 20/20, he probably had a crush on me. I wish now I’d had the temerity to say something, because I think we would have been a good couple, but it never occurred to me at the time.

I know that he and his girlfriend went off to university together, but I’ve heard that they’ve since broken up. I’d be curious to see him at our 10 year reunion next year, but I’m going into the Peace Corps in August, so it is not to be.

42

I met her in 12th grade, and she was startling. A swimmer, a big gal, possessed of long thick flaming red hair, flashing green eyes, a killer laugh and a mind that was awhirl with intelligence, humor and kindness.

I did the right thing, and did not date her because I was involved with someone who was up in Boston in college ( I was in Philly ). In many more mature ways, she might well have been The One. Rare, in the 25 years since, have I met a soul with whom I shared such utter comfort, happiness and intense good times.

I kissed her exactly once. No idea what became of her. She did not attend my H.S. She “got away” because I demurred, and have regretted it to some extent ever since.

Ahhhh, Julie… wherefore art thou, Julie?

Cartooniverse

43

Psst! Wherefore means why. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet was asking (to herself, out loud) why Romeo was named as he was. Because he was a Montague and she was a Capulet, which were two families that had a big feud going on, which is why they weren’t supposed to see each other. Also there was no comma. With a comma it means something more like “Why are you alive?” or “Why do you exist?” Or was that your intention?

44

Um. Okay. My apologies for wrecking the quote and misusing it.

I should have just written, " Julie, where are you now? "

45

Mine isn’t so much a true love situation, but I had a friend in high school who I had a crush on when I was a sophomore and he was a senior. He was so funny and cool and smart in a way that I wanted to be. We had a class together and became friends, and he wrote me a poem that still makes me feel ebullient, then on the last day of school, he asked for my number. That summer we, um, enjoyed each other’s company, but he was moving to Milwaukee, and I think he might have had a girlfriend too, so we were just “friends”. For the next couple of years we saw each other when he came home for holidays, but we never really dated, mostly because he lived a good two hours away, and… well, I never really let myself consider the possibility because of that. But we still enjoyed each others company with much zest when we saw each other, (despite the fact that sometimes we were seeing other people, sheepish face).

But, I haven’t seen him for years. I’d like to see him, we really did get along well, though it’s probably a good thing that we don’t see each other. I love my boyfriend lots, but I have a kind of Pavlovian sexual response to this other guy… But I would resist it, or ignore it, or maybe not even have it. Plus, I’m sure he has a girlfriend or a somebody, and the “zest” was secondary to our friendship anyway.

So, in an idiotic “missed connections” sort of way, if you read this, the Bugs Bunny witch is looking for you in a very, very lazy sort of way. I think I’m in the damn phone book in Minneapolis. The half-assed ball is in YOUR court now, baby.

ZJ

46

Thanks to everybody for the responses – I’ve enjoyed reading your stories. :slight_smile:

One more for me stands out in my mind – this time a little reversed. This was a girl for whom I was apparently her crush, but I didn’t know until it was too late. (So she’s still one that “got away”).

My college was pretty small. The type where “everybody knows everybody else” is not too far from the mark, especially for those who lived on campus in the dorms. At the very least, you pretty much recognized everybody else. And the upperclassmen tended to be better recognized and more well-known than the freshmen, for instance.

So it’s my senior year. Near the start of the year, I briefly dated a freshman girl that turned out to be very different than who she presented herself to be. Meanwhile, there was apparently another freshman girl, call her D, who had a crush on me. I didn’t even know who she was, that early in the year. A few months in, I think I recognized her face, but didn’t know her name.

So of course as the year progresses, I do get to know more of the newer students. And as usual, there were many of us who goofed off in the computer lab, sending silly e-mail messages around. Mine were usually filled with double-entendres, just joking with friends, mock suggestiveness and silliness mixed together. In the spring term, she was one of the people I exchanged messages with.

Just at the end of the term – when I was about to graduate – D sent me a message telling me that she had a big crush on me back at the start of that school year. And she also noted that she found it ironic that I didn’t know who she was back then, but that I was writing her those sorts of e-mails now. She signed it, “Your past secret admirer, D.”

Of course, I was about to graduate and move. But I found myself wishing I’d known back at the start of the year. Wishing I had known that she was interested. Because I would have been interested (especially knowing the type of person she was after I did get to become friends with her) – I just never knew she liked me. And in hindsight, she would have been a much better choice than that girl I did briefly date in the fall term.

47

High school. His name was Mike. I had known him slightly but not had any classes with him until geometry, tenth grade. He was slim and not particularly tall, just about my height, in fact. He had curly dark brown hair that always needed cutting, a soft voice, and the most beautiful green eyes I’ve ever seen. He was friendly and silly as well as intelligent, and he smiled a lot. I started to notice him when he ended up sitting beside me. He helped with some stuff about angles that was really confusing me a few times. My best friend had a crush on him too. He was in a different class with her. He was a good hugger. I lost track of him after that year. I think of him more often than I think of certain rather unmemorable boyfriends.

48

Some very touching stories in this thread, and I’ve enjoyed reading them. For sheer pain, however, none of you can touch me. Grab your hankies and have a seat.

Her name is Julie. Wonderful, wonderful person. Valedictorian, voted most beautiful in our senior class. I fell for her in tenth grade and stayed that way for . . . well, to this day.

She was completely out of my league and I knew that. But it was a very small high school (53 in my graduating class) so we shared many classes and friends. During a school trip I found myself listening to her problems for a couple of hours and we became pretty good friends.

She became aware of my feelings during our senior year, but it was obvious she wasn’t interested. She was still sweet and kind to me, so I could deal with it. Then she came to me one day to tell me that she had a crush on my best friend, and asked me to help her make a connection. Being the codependent, pain-addicted nut that I am, I did as she asked. :wally They were quite the item!
We would all get together during college breaks. During one such visit the two of them made love on my couch while I tried to smother myself with a pillow in the next room.

We still keep in touch. I am very careful to hide the fact that I’m still carrying a huge torch for her. I figure I’ll get my chance in our next incarnation.

49

Thalion – I was reading through thinking “not that bad”. Then got to this:

Okay, ouch. Very ouch. Seems a little mean, since she knew you had a thing for her.
[slight hijack]
well, due to some threads I recently read, I may have a new “board crush” or two. But they haven’t gotten away yet, so I’m not saying any more. :wink:
[/sh]

50

I can think of 3:

-in high school, I had a much more popular friend who would try to find guys I should date. Our freshman year she tried to set me up with the best friend of her boyfried. That didn’t work out. At the start of sophmore year, she actually said, “So, who should you date this year. Oh, what about Aaron*?” He was a friend of the guy she tried to set me up with the year before. He was a year ahead of me in school and I really didn’t see him much. Nonetheless, I started to develop a bit of a crush on him (even though he drove an El Camino). We were on the Quiz Bowl team together and that was about the most time I ever spent with him. Near the end of my sophomore year, I ended up living with assorted families, including hers, as my dad and stepmom had moved to a new state and I stayed behind to finish the school year. It was mid-May and we both decided to sun-bathe. Afterwards we were sweaty and coated with lotion, so it was always a battle as to who would bathe first. I won once, and then I heard her calling my crush and trying to talk him up. And then he told her he had a girlfriend in Texas (we were about 6 states away from Texas) and that was that. I don’t know if it was true or not, but it was a bit humbling. I have no idea where he is now.

-My sophomore year in college there was I guy in more dorm who looked a bit like a teacher I had in high school who was rather good looking. We got along pretty well. There was one night after a party where I thought I’d get to spend some alone-time with him (until a guy on his floor who had a thing for me ended up crashing the party). Nothing happened until the next year when I went to a party his roommates were hosting. We hooked up then, but nothing much happened as we were interrupted because his room was being used as the coatroom (incidentally, a woman that interrupted us was my rival that past summer in a fling I had with a different guy). I saw him one more time maybe 4 months later. When we talked, he mentioned he was embarrassed because he saw another woman he, in his words, “hooked up once with at a party when I was drunk.” I took that as an analogy to what happened with us, and never read much more into it than that. I emailed him several months ago–he lives in Alaska now.

-The summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, I started hanging out with some guys in an engineering fraternity. There was one guy who I also worked with who I could tell was into me. I liked him too–he was cute in a dorky sort of way. We were drinking buddies but nothing ever seemed to happen. At one point, I was at one of their frat parties and one of his brothers told me he had a thing for me. I said I knew, but I was waiting for him to make a move. Then I got a summer job and moved away, and when I came back for my senior year, things were never the same between us. At some point (I’m not exactly sure when), he started dating a woman, and then the next summer I met my boyfriend. I know how to get in touch with him, too, but I really miss our drinking buddy days (for a long time, he’d seen me under the influence more than any other person).

In the last 2 cases especially, I really do wonder “what if?” What if I had been more forward, or if certain nights had gone a bit differently. I love my boyfriend dearly, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wish my past had gone differently.

51

I just got back from my 20th high school reunion, where I saw Liz, on whom I nurtured a very painful and disruptive crush junior into senior year. I thought I’d put her behind me until I got a look at those big soulful green eyes again…and instantly, helplessly, began reliving the past. The desperately needy pleading for Liz to give me a chance (of course she never did). The wacked-out obsessive testifying to all my friends that she was the love of my life. The anger towards her boyfriends and dates, that turned in on myself and left me deeply confused about what it meant to be a man and what love really was. The blowing off my classwork. The finally getting over it, but being left with a feeling of aimless self-pity that helped lose me my first two real girlfriends.

Since the reunion I’ve been in a rueful, regretful mood, both for what I did to her and what I’ve done to myself. Suffice it to say that she’s ten years married now, and I’ve had twenty years of false starts.

52

Mark*. One of the very first people I met at college. Blond hair, blue eyes, smart, geeky, writer, actor, had been to Ireland, drank Guinness…dreamy**. We were in a theatre class together. We hung out, made a movie with friends, talked for extended periods of time, had some very close moments to becoming undressed. He walked me from our theater class to my next class every day. I knew he was seriously into me, and I was seriously into him. But alas, I had a crappy long distance boyfriend (CLDBF) and we were gonna make it!!!one Yeah, not so much. By the time I broke it off with (CLDBF), Mark had a girlfriend. I thought about him every day, pined. I even [bad bad confession] dated his roommate so I could spend time with him.[/bad bad confession] Eventually I got over him, dated other people, had a life, got married, etc. But I still think about him a lot. Not in a pining way anymore, just a “Hey, wish I had pulled my head out of my ass and dated the guy,” kinda way.
*Names changed to protect me from looking like a creepy stalker or whatever.
**Actually, Bird Man has all those qualities too. It took me a while before I convinced myself I wasn’t just trying to date Mark again. I guess that’s just “my type.”

53

Her name was REDACTED. I had a huge crush on her (my first real crush) and was absolutely head-over-heels for her for the first two years of high school. I asked her out early freshman year before I had any idea about what a girlfriend was, only that “asking a girl out” was something you did when you couldn’t stop thinking about a girl. She shot me down, and hard. And then she had her older brother come by and ask me to stop bugging her. Didn’t change the fact that she was gorgeous and still made my knees more than a little weak when she went by.

Junior year I submitted a handful of poems to the school literary magazine (She and I were each on the board), and kept mum about my work as it came up for a vote. When two of my poems had already been accepted, I began to argue against my poems – at which point she gleefully took up a contrarian position, and argued that a poem I had written (about her) was one of the most beautiful things she had ever read. If there were any justice in the world she would have been well-and-truly wooed at that point, but nope. No such luck.

Senior year, graduation day, she ended up stuck behind me in a buffet line for fruit salad or some such, and managed to mumble out something very sweet, like “I wasn’t really very nice to you, but I always loved your writing.” I said “I wasn’t nice either. And I really like the painting you picked for your art show - I’m glad you didn’t use the green one.” That was that.

Fast-forward almost ten years to last spring: it was about three months after my wedding, and I was walking past a grocery store – in my Air Force uniform – when I saw her at the smoothie counter. I thought it was her, but did a double-take, my legs almost went out from under me, and I had to be sure. I was going in for lunch anyway, so I just went right past the lunch area, walked up to her, and asked if it was really her. It was, and she was gorgeous as ever. She didn’t recognize me at first, and I noticed her sneaking a look at my name tag trying to figure out who I was. Back then I had shaggy hair and was pretty scrawny; now I have a #1 buzz all over and have filled out very nicely. Even my wife says so. :wink: Anyway, she was completely freaked out, stumbled through the conversation, and acted horribbly tongue-tied. We exchanged e-mails trying to get together for lunch to “catch up” but after three lame excuses in a row I got the hint, and stopped bugging her.

I got a nice little frisson of satisfaction from

  • finally being able to speak confidently and look a girl in the eyes
  • looking so damn good right then and there, and
  • seeing her blush and stammer

Does that make me a bad person? Did I handle it badly? I don’t care – I got my opportunity to find out “what if” (nothing, that’s what) and got a chance to be my smoothest, handsomest self and make a good impression. And I found out that yes, my crush on her was exactly skin-deep, and she was just that shallow.

54

I had known Katie for 8 years by the time we ended up in High School together, but I had never really talked or interacted with her in those previous 8 years. We ended up at a private all-girl Catholic High School known for its liberal bent and strong-willed intelligent women. Katie was still in a class above the rest, in addition to being smart, witty and a certifed geek, she had this special cool calm about her that made her an enigma. We were friends and ended up participating in a lot of clubs together. I started thinking about her all the time and even having dreams about her. On my way home from the family vacation in my Junior year I figured out that I had a crush on her. I was very confused, I thought that I was straight! I told some of my other friends in the school and they all encouraged me to let Katie know of my feelings. I did, she was flattered but said she was straight. I was crushed, but remained friends with her and decided to try dating other girls. What’s interesting about this story, is that after High School, she went off to asia where she realized that she was bisexual after all and has since crushed on an actress that looks like me. :smiley: I don’t think think she’s interested in me, but we still keep in touch and always make time to hang out with each other when we are in town.

Which brings me to my next story. I started dating girls as well as guys to see if I was really bisexual after all. Emily came to our school with her then-girlfriend to see one of our play practices. She was beautiful and funny and we hit it off in no time. Soon, we were driving all over town together, visiting museums, seeing plays, and engaging in a lot of other activites that boys my age were loath to do. She was from a very different world than I. My parents and most of my friends were upper-middle class from the suburbs but she lived in the inner city in what basically was a trailer trash family. She had to work two jobs because she helped her mother support her younger siblings as well as herself. She wasn’t as well educated as most of my friends, but she had a sharper mind than most and was eager to learn and enjoyed the fine arts. She was also an excellent kisser and the best dancer I’ve ever dated. It was against the rules to take females to my High School’s sponsored dances, so I dressed her up as a guy and snuck her in anyway. She always ate wintermint gum and whenever I eat a piece I am reminded of her until this day. Although I was emotionally in love with her, I realized I wasn’t physically attracted to her and we slowly drifted apart. I often think of her and wonder how she is doing. It makes me sad sometimes, because I know how hard it is to escape poverty, but she was an intelligent, gifted girl and I hope she managed to escape the ghetto and get herself to college.

55

My crush lasted all four years of high school, from the first time I saw her in our freshman journalism class. We ended up on the newspaper staff together, so spent a ton of time together and became pretty good friends. For four years, I tried to work up the nerve to ask her out, but never could do it, too afraid of rejection and having to face her after embarrassing myself like that.

Looking back, there were plenty of signs that she liked me too: she always seemed to end up in my car when the staff did things together, before dances her best friend would repeatedly ask me if I were asking her, things like that that I never picked up on.

Two moments stand out in particular: 1) our newspaper staff took a trip to Chicago for a four day conference. One afternoon, it somehow turned into just the two of us, walking around Chicago, eating lunch together, hanging out in the hotel room (innocently, obviously) while everyone else was out on the town.
2) I somehow got chosen to be on the court for a dance. I was not the kind of guy who got chosen for such things, and couldn’t find anyone to go with me. I was pretty much resigned to not going, but she told me she would be happy to go with me, even though she had a boyfriend. We go and we stay the whole dance. Afterwards, we go to the party where her boyfriend is hanging out. She spends the whole party talking to me, though, and leaves with me. When we get to her house, I walk her to her door and she gives me a hug. Man, that was the top of the world for me.

I haven’t seen her since high school, except for a chance meeting at a Target a few years ago, so I have no idea what she’s doing now. I’ve been happily married for three years now, and honestly hadn’t really thought about her for quite some time until I saw this thread. I guess my thoughts on it now are: I was such a putz in high school.

56

Laura Kashetta, Scranton Central High School, Class of '89.

Call me!

57

Missy. I knew her in high school and part of college. She was a year younger than me, so I was that weird college kid that attended high school prom, all for her. I wouldn’t have gone to prom with anyone else.

We used to do the things all crazy high school couples did… staying out really late but realizing there wasn’t a lot to do, so we’d sit in my car in her driveway just talking for hours. We wanted to date each other, but never at the same time. When I wanted to, she didn’t want to. When she wanted to, I didn’t.

I was in college in Chicago, and she was in college in Bloomington. I would make the 3 hour trip frequently to see her and sleep with her in her little dorm room bed. Nothing ever happened except for some innocent spooning, since we were still playing the “I only want to date you when you don’t want to date me” game. The best night though was when we got completely trashed and fell asleep in each other arm’s outside in the grass in a field. She would try to kiss me, but I would pull away. A few seconds later, I would decide it was okay and try to kiss her. She’d pull away. We did that a few times throughout the night, and it was the sweetest, most frustrating thing ever.

Eventually the weirdness from never dating but always wanting to got to us. We both said things we didn’t mean, and we both acted in ways that conflicted with what we said. We went our separate ways and lost touch over the years. I’ve had the chance to catch up with her a little bit lately. She’s married and happy. I still believe she and I could have had something special, but it wasn’t meant to be.

58

Everybody seems to have moved on nicely. (Or am I underestimating what some of you went through?)

Do you think a youthful crush gone bad can do long-term damage to someone’s ability to form relationships? Or am I just making excuses for myself?

Since I got back from my 20th reunion, I’ve even been entertaining the possibility that my crush, and the negative life lessons I “learned” from it, got me started on the road to clinical depression (which I’ve wrestled with for 15+ years).

59

When you are young, the highs are too high, and the lows too low. Everything seems to go to extremes. If you get an F on your report card, if you crash the car, if your girlfriend breaks up with you, you think it’s the end of the world. Teenagers commit suicide over these things.

When you get older, you realize it’s not the end of the world, and realize you’ve survived all that and you can survive a lot more. You get a more realistic perspective, and you move on.

60

I married mine. It lasted six years. He’s a good man, has remarried twice since. He seems happy. We are completely different people now.