New Girl

I didn’t know her at all. She was just the girl with the locker next to mine until the one lunch break she approached me and asked if I’d be her boyfriend. It seemed like a fine enough thing to get involved with as a seventh grader so I agreed.

I spent the next two weeks in a fairly consistent state of fear.

I was afraid of a lot of things but probably my parents most of all. In the culture that I grew up in, boys aren’t supposed to date exclusively until they’re twenty-one. If my parents found out about Shelby, I wouldn’t be going to Jake’s arcade birthday party the next month.

I was afraid of my friends. What would they think? What if they liked her too? Is that good or bad?

I was afraid of the girl. I had never been a boyfriend before, so I didn’t really know how to do it. Who does what? What is it that we do? We’re going out now? Where are we going? Oh it’s not a place you go? Okay. It’s all very confusing.

I didn't understand romance but she made the whole thing very easy by never talking to me. I don’t think we said a word to each other through our entire fourteen day courtship. When compared to future attempts, Shelby was a fantastic success.

Dating was usually pretty terrible for the next decade. That’s a dramatic way to describe it but I just wasn’t very good at it. It could have been for lack of guidance. My dad was screening female phone calls until I was eighteen so fatherly advice (outside of him grounding me for breaking his rules) was hard to come by. Maybe it was because Boy Meets World and The Wonder Years set unrealistic expectations for us 90’s kids. How did those two real-life-brothers Ben and Fred Savage end up with their own tv shows and my childhood dream-girls? It’s that kind of nepotism that led me to believe I would one day marry Ashley and my brother would marry Mary-Kate Olsen.

Truly though, the most likely culprit for my ten years of shitty dating was youth. Inexperience. Not knowing what the hell I was doing and then taking advice from other kids who also didn’t know what they were doing. After my first set of heartbreaks a close friend told me I was being too nice. I needed to play the game with a little more intention. If I cared less, they would care more. It was so backward to me but I tried the care-less technique and was surprised when it actually worked.

I italicize the last word of the last sentence to represent sarcasm. It didn’t really work. Sure, caring less protected me in a way but it was really just a fearful wall that kept me from growing. Have you ever done the “care-less” thing? It’s sucky, right? I became philophobic (I Googled for that one). A love cynic.

So, Time passed. The nice thing about time passing is that it does a pretty good job at providing experience. While friends suggested my love struggles stemmed from things like incompatible astrological signs and poor taste, I’m (almost) certain I just needed some extra time to figure out how to be a boyfriend.

Generally speaking, people get married fast in Utah. If you were ordering a marriage… from the marriage store... in Utah, and you ordered “The Usual”, you would probably get six to eight months of dating, two months engagement, and for believers, married forever. When you’re six to eight years past The Usual, you wonder if maybe you’ll just stay alone forever.

Full disclosure: I’ve never been alone forever so I don’t know that it’s the worst thing ever… but I like not being alone A LOT, so please don’t mind me assuming that I’d prefer an alternative.

That’s where Ali comes in.

You develop modest expectations in dating once you’ve been doing it for a while. To be honest, I didn’t expect the first date let alone the second, third, and fourth. That phrase they tell you, the one about just knowing when it’s right, like we’re born with some kind of soulmate Spidey-sense, finally clicked for me.

She made me feel normal. Without context that might seem like a weak compliment but it’s one I’ve always wanted to share. She gets me. She does a million other things for me but making me feel uncrazy is one of my favorites. I hope I make her feel normal.