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

In My Humble Opinion
61

Oh, Jeez. I had so many crushes in high school. Sometimes it seemed like there was a different one every month. At first, thinking about it now, I don’t recall any of them being requited (except for the one girl I dated for 3 months or so), but after I thought about it for a while, I remembered Susie. We were in German class together, and worked together on a few projects; I even went to her house to work on them with her, and met her mom (who was actually German, and very charming). Susie (it now seems in retrospect–although I could be totally wrong) was always talking to me, and saying how much I looked like the school debate teacher (who she thought was cute), and writing my name on things all the time. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have worked; I was a brain (we didn’t use the word geek at the time), and she was pretty popular, and in the artistic crowd. Plus she was a year older and at least a head taller. But she was way cute, and might have been interested in me. Huh. Haven’t thought about Susie in years. [wistful smile]

But the absolute nuclear weapon of crushes for me was Suzanne. She moved to my school in third grade, and I instantly developed a life-threatening crush on her, and kept it until the end of eighth grade (with two not-very-serious crushes on other girls in there somewhere). I sent her cards (Valentines and other), gave her gifts (jewelry, mostly), and generally made sure she knew Goddamn good and well that I thought she was the greatest thing since sliced bread. No dice; she was in the most popular group in school (both schools) and I…well, see above, re: brain. So she finally actually came right out and told me that she wasn’t interested in dating (but in a very sweet, nice way), and we went to different high schools, and that was that. My mom is still good friends with her mom, and I hear about her sometimes; apparently her life hasn’t gone that well. She married a guy who turned out to be not a great guy, and they’re divorced now. But I heard recently that she’s getting married again, and trying to put her life back together. I hope she makes it; I’m very happily coupled now, but I still think about her from time to time; difficult not to, when she occupied almost my every waking thought for six years. Heh.

62

My crush was a guy named Michael. He was literally tall, dark and handsome–I fell for him like a tons of bricks in 6th grade. We were in the same after school bowling “league” together (the only time in my life that I have bowled, actually). He went to a different school in my district.

Never saw him again until HS. Oh, my. He was in my US History class-he sat next to me. Thick dark hair, ice blue eyes, small, nice mustache (hey, it’s was the late '70’s), wiry frame. I crushed on him something fierce and when our entire class flew to Washington DC–I had high hopes for some sparks to fly.

Alas, my trip was ruined by finding him kissing JW behind the Lincoln Memorial. I was devastated. We joked and laughed etc in class all the time–he was fun and funny and smart.
We wrote one another in college and I saw him a few times after I had married and had a few kids. He came to our house the day after a HS reunion–we had a great time. I was always glad for these times–somehow it seemed to me that as long as Mike was out in the world, doing fine, that in a strange way my world and life were OK, too.
He didn’t marry JW-who moved back to Texas the next year–but he died about 8 ago years from complications of alcholism. He was 35.

Mike. Oh, Mike.

63

Apparently I can now kill threads.
Sorry for the downer, folks.

64

I went to a very small academically embarassing private high school in rural Alabama where it took some real effort on my part to almost flunk out. For the last two years I was there I had a major crush on a classmate who was a year younger than I was but I was completely unwilling to admit even to myself at that time that I was gay.

Turns out: not only was he gay, but he’s now a major big-shot in the Log Cabin Republicans in a major metropolis (any more info would identify him). I am now so glad I didn’t “go for it”- I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror if I’d knowingly shagged a Republican. ;j

65

I had a totally unrequited crush in HS - the kind where I used to “arrange” to walk by his home to see if I could catch a glimpse of him (he lived right across the street from the public library, so perhaps all those trips to the library were good for me). He probably was aware of my crush, but we rarely had any interaction; when we did speak, he was friendly, but never asked me out or anything.

My parents moved away during my freshman year in college and I didn’t really return to the town where I went to HS until my 30th HS reunion back in 2000. He wasn’t in my class (he was a year older), but I got curious and looked him up on the internet. Lo and behold, he’s a pediatric cardiologist! That’s probably all I should reveal w/o actually revealing his name. He’s just as handsome at 54 as he was at 18, btw. Married. laughs Ah well, the one that got away, I suppose. :slight_smile:

66

I never really thought about her being “the one that got away”, but that’s exactly what Brittany is for me.

In high school, about 10th grade, I loved to sing and play sports so I joined football and choir both. High School Musical huh? Lolol Well after joining choir, I started to notice this little blonde girl that sang alto. For the next year we would spend every day just kind of staring at eachother from across the room. Eventually, I worked up the courage to ask her for her number. It worked. Problem was, I was extremely shy and didn’t have a Dad, so I never really learned how to talk to girls. Needless to say, I was to nervous to even really talk to her. I guess I rubbed her the wrong way because she scared me off after that. Didn’t talk to her for about 4 years.

Cut to 2 years after graduation and I’m in a long term relationship. Brittany messages me out of the blue and asks me how I’m doing. Eventually, I start telling her how horrible the relationship had become. She starts telling me all this stuff (again) about how I’m a great and honest man that would be a catch for anyone. Well, being in a relationship, I turned her down this time. So, we didn’t talk for another two years.

Cut to a month ago (July-2015) and I’m finally put of the toxic relationship. I message Brittany and tell her I need someone to talk to. Once again, I hear the same complements, but this time she says it’s not coincidence that we met again. I see her one night in a McDonald’s parking lot, and everything goes great! We talk for an hour about our lives and give eachother about 10 hugs. She asks me to come over in a few days, and I agree adamantly.
(At this point she knows everything and I now know that in high school, she had a crush on me too!)

So I start heading over to her house and she calls me to tell me her best friend and dad are both there. I’m like, wtf? But she insists that I come over and meet them. So I go over and we have a great time. Her friend likes me, her dad likes me, and we all talk, drink, smoke, and have a great time… That is, until I mistakenly tell her “I need to talk to her”. Now, all I was needing to tell her was that I wanted a hug, but the way it came out, I think she thought I was going to profess my undying love or something…

Anyway, she just says “nooo” and goes to bed without even saying goodnight. I lay down on the couch and watch shows with her friend until she goes to lay down as well. For the next 3 hours, I lie there wondering whether or not I should leave before I fall asleep.

Next morning she gets up and acts all awkward. We talk for a minute before I head out and she says she sorry for how she acted. But after that, I got no hug or any contact whatsoever. So I left and I haven’t heard from her in 4 days.

I honestly thought we had a great time before my horribly worded question. But now I feel like maybe she changed her mind about me. But I’m also worried she might just be afraid. She’s admitted that she’s never been with a guy as nice as me which makes me think she’s into “bad boys”. Can bad boys be good dad’s? Can bad boys take care of you? Why am I not good enough? All questions I’ve been asking myself, but I guess that’s life huh? As of now, i’m thinking I’ll probably never hear from her again. If anything changes, I’ll make sure to edit this post.

In any case, it really helps to write all this down. Thanks to the topic creator for the free venting session and thanks to whoever reads this.

Andrew in Arkansas
Thinking about Brittany, The One That Got Away.

67

@eleanorigby

I’m so sorry, I can’t imagine how I would feel if mine died. I feel your pain immensely at this moment. I’m so very sorry. No words can convey those feelings, I know. Cherish them until you meet him again in the afterlife. :slight_smile: I’ll cry for both of us. (I’m a guy btw lol guys cry too! Thank you for the post!)

68

@doug

Hell yeah these lost relationships affect us negatively man! Insecurity and regret are littered throughout this board. Sadly, that’s what lost love does to a person. :frowning:

69

@walloon

“Surviving” is simply not enough for me.

70

Hey Andy, you revived a 10 year old thread! Many of the people you replied to may not even be around anymore.

Good luck with Brittany. How about you just try and talk to her directly about how you feel?

71

My lost love was my first true love affair. We’d get to her house after school let out, have a couple of hours of blissful, sweaty sex, then go out for a while so that we could “officially” arrive home after her parents did.

Her dad got transferred to San Antonio in his job. We wrote, we called, we…faded away. I have thought of her many, many times over the years. Last year, I found my high school yearbook online. I found her picture, and she is still timelessly lovely.

I’ve often wondered where she is and what’s happened with her. I hope the years have been good to her.

72

There’s a girl I was incredibly infatuated with the last couple of years of high school. Unfortunately (or perhaps not that unfortunately in hindsight) she wasn’t interested. It’s not like I had no interest in anyone else at the time, but since none of them returned my interest either it was hard to leave my infatuation behind. She moved away, and the infatuation went away. I saw her walk by when I was in grad school, and it didn’t even hit me who she was until she was gone. I’m pretty sure she was married by that time. She was drop dead beautiful and a very nice person, but I don’t think we would have been compatible at all.

73

Back in high school, I (and no doubt a hundred other guys) carried a torch for a particular girl. Cheerleader, homecoming queen, all that sort of thing. We went to college together for a few years and shared a major so I had her in a couple classes and she was a pretty sharp and nice person. We didn’t really have anything in common though and even in college she was hitting the sororities, doing cheerleading again, etc. Just different circles.

A little while back, I looked her up on Facebook. Still looks great, damn near how she looked 25 years ago. But her Facebook page was also covered with posts about how, if you post a picture of your daughter going to kindergarten, they were going to be captured and sold as child sex slaves to Arab billionaires and that sort of nonsense. Sort of killed any residual nostalgic crush.

74

Starting somewhere in grade school, I developed a crush on a classmate named Christopher. He was tall, dark-haired and blue-eyed and, while not conventionally hunkish, was certainly good looking. We had different circles of friends, and my admiration was strictly from afar. Between 8th grade and high school, we attended the same summer camp. We developed a friendship there which meant the world to me and probably not a darn thing to him. On the final day of camp, he pressed a little river rock into my hand, looked into my eyes, and told me to be happy. Again, meaningless to him, I’m sure, but cherished by me (I still have the silly little rock in my jewelry box).

We went to different high schools and it was many years before I saw him again. My husband and I had volunteered to work for the Clinton campaign and when we were being introduced around, there was Chris and his wife. My husband and he hit it off immediately, and eventually we four became social friends. It didn’t take me long to realize how much the two men were alike in personality. I suppose that means that somewhere, deep inside, I never quite got over that crush.

75

Her name was Nan (Nanette to be precise, but she’ll always be Nan to me).

I never had much in the way of crushes (a couple in Middle school, but always at a distance as I was both very immature and heavilty bullied during that time, which didn’t do much for my confidence. Even through High School, I was pretty much the loner, didn’t date or even conceive of asking a girl out…until my senior year.

She said something too me as I was carrying stuff out from a play production my 12th grade English Lit class had done…and was waiting for me when i came back in from the trash heap. A couple weeks later I saw here at the school library before classes started (she was a volunteer assistant) and pretty soon I was there every morning. Our first date was to go roller-skating (don’t ask me why) and we went to the Senior Prom together. I don’t know if it was love or simple adoration, but she was special, dammit, that’s all I knew.

And then, we went off to separate colleges. I didn’t have a car, so it was mostly letters and phone calls. I still had no idea how to properly ‘court’ a lady, so I probably made every mistake in the book…but she didn’t seem to mind.

My junior year of college she transferred to my school…and she’d changed. Making up stories, taking off and not knowing where she was, saying something one day and changing it the other…in retrospect I think she needed help, someone to rely on…and I fluffled it completely. Didn’t pay attention, didn’t give her the caring and closeness that she could have hung onto, didn’t do squat. And so we drifted apart that year, and she left school that spring–and I haven’t seen or heard of her since.

It was my fault. I know that. And I still miss her, 40 years later.

I hope she is happy and well. I am…satisfied with the course of my life, but now and then (like the Bruce Hornsby song), I go down the road not taken…again.

This is the first time I have ever written this out in my 62 years. Thank you, OP from years ago, for the opportunity.

76

JS. Lush, dark hair on her arms. The heart wants what the heart wants… I was 12/13. I took Latin as an option, because she was in the class. I wasn’t very good at it. I coded my timetable for days and classes that included her, good days vs bad days. I have a photocopy of a newspaper reprint of a year group photo that included her (and me) - I challenged a female friend to pick her out and she got it in one :slight_smile:

A couple of years ago, aged 50 and 500 miles from school, I happened to run into an ex-formmate. I didn’t recall her (in fact, the only two girls I could recall from that form made her grimace - I changed schools at 13, but any girls who could have lodged in my memory from 11-13 probably weren’t that well liked by the other girls…). Anyway, does it count as a school crush if I wish I’d noticed her then, because I definitely crushed on her at 50…

77

Senior Class Skip Day 1982. You know, that unofficial, but yet everyone knows when it is day that almost all of the Senior class skips school and just goes somewhere to hang out all day?

So my senior skip day, the various cliques and groups are heading off to where ever they are going to meet up. Terri S. asks if she can ride with me. Whoa, what?

Okay a little background. I met Terri in the 8th grade when she and I began attending the same high school. Our H.S. had multiple middle schools that kids moved up from, and she came from a different one than me. Jet black wavy hair, green eyes, and a nicely developing body. i was immediately smitten. And bad. But she seemed out of my league. i wasn’t super confident then, and I never made a move, or even hinted.

High School rolled by, I dated other girls, she dated other guys. Actually she kinda got in with a rough crowd. Her boyfriend through 10th and 11th grade was the school drug dealer. Plus, by that time, I was in a fairly long high school relationship myself.

Jump forward to the last weeks of our Senior year. I had broken things off with my gf a few months before, and, unbeknownst to me, Terri had finally pulled herself away from her loser bf. The day before Senior Skip Day. We all decide our group would meet at a local dive for breakfast and then head to the lake for day. Out of nowhere, Terri asks me if she can ride with me. :smiley: Yeah, absolutely!!

So she does. On the way to the lake, she tells me that she has had a huge crush on me since 8th grade, but never had the nerve to let me know. I tell her the same, and we both bemoan the lost opportunity. We know there is no future, since she was moving to Indiana to live with her Dad a few weeks after graduation, while I was heading off to college, starting in the summer session. So we agreed to make it ONE DAY to remember.

And, boy, did we!!!

I never spoke to her again, and our lives went in very different directions. I know from friends of friends of friends that Terri wound up becoming someone I could have never been with in the long run. Best we left it at one day of pure submersion in “could have been”.

78

Oddly enough, I kept getting together with my high school crush when I was in college – she attended the school down the road. I lost touch with her when I went to grad school (she stayed in the same school), but after I got my doctorate I came back to the area and found she was still there. Married, now. But we renewed our friendship, and, after I met Pepper Mill the two met and got to be friends, and she knew my daughter MilliCal since she was born.

She moved away to the West Coast after that, but we keep in touch. I saw her a couple of months ago when I had a meeting in LA.

I never had more than a couple of dates with her in all the time we’ve known each other, and she’s been through many relationships in that time, but we’ve remained c lose friends.

79

I still wonder about Cynthia.

She was tall, blonde, and willowy, but Cynthia was not one of the “popular people.” Rather, she was down-to-earth with defined goals for the future, and thus meshed perfectly with us lesser mortals, personality-wise. Still, her looks scared a lot of us off–why would somebody who looked like her want to go out with somebody who looked like–well, me?

Imagine my surprise, some years later, to meet up with Cynthia again, at a social gathering. She was still as attractive as ever. At one point, when my date went to the ladies’ room, and her date went to the bar, she leaned over and said, “Spoons, I so wished you and I had dated in high school. You were intelligent and erudite, and I wanted to get to know you better.”

:eek:

That was the last time I saw Cynthia. If she was to reappear in my life tomorrow–well, I wouldn’t be at all afraid to say, “Let’s go for a coffee and catch up.”

80

So here is a follow-up to my posting to this thread.

In 2007, we had our 20 year class reunion and it was a huge deal. We managed to get over half of our class to show up, we rented a very nice venue, had a table of memorabilia, a DJ, dinner… the works.

Penny was there. She had just had surgery on her skull to remove an infected shunt, so she was without hair, but had a very nice scarf wrapped around her head. She was still as beautiful as I remembered her to be.

We talked and caught up. She had her daughter who was a teenager, the same age as my oldest son. I told her about my huge crush I had on her when we were back in school. I was a little nervous about telling her, but it just felt right. There was no pressure and no anxiety over rejection. She had her life and I had mine. She was very flattered and told me she thought it was sweet.

We are still friends today. She and my wife get along great when we (wife and I) go out with friends. I’m happy that we are friends today.