Stare at the endearingly nerdy boy sitting two seats in front of you in Mrs. Schubert’s fifth grade class. Stare a lot. Ditch learning your fractions for the much more thrilling pursuit of writing his name fifty times, with one hundred tiny hearts, on a piece of scratch paper that you later shred into several thousand bits. Say, “Of course I like him,” quizzically when your friends ask. “No, that’s not what we meant!” they shout in frustration. Know exactly what they meant and gleefully relish your clever evasion. Write awful poems in sparkly gel pen comparing his whisper to a soft breeze and lock them in your miniature hot pink locker from Limited Too that also contains N’sync HitClips and Smarties candies.
Feel thrilled when he picks you as his first choice for his basketball team at recess, even though you know it’s because you’re actually better than the other kids due to the advantage of being a Japanese American baller. Feel incredibly touched when he saves up enough NeoPoints playing hours and hours of Neopets Destruct-o-Match to send you a silver paintbrush for your Shoyru. Figure this is probably the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you. Feel sad when he moves away, but quickly forget because you’ve graduated sixth grade and many more exciting things await in middle school.
Start AIM’ing with the quiet kid in your eighth grade science class. Spend hours typing back and forth about everything you can possibly think up and send each other Blink 182 songs. Feel too awkward to speak to each other in person other than discussing science homework. Flirt for the first time over the Internet with bold phrases such as “I really enjoy talking to u” and feel a million bolts of lightning course through your veins when he types “ur hair looked really nice today”. Think about that phrase through five straight periods the next day at school.
Get dropped off by your mom in her minivan at the movie theater and watch “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” for your very first date, but drag your two mutual friends along to make it less awkward. Feel terrified throughout the entire experience. Almost faint when he puts his hand over yours halfway through. Silently scream to yourself I can’t believe a boy is touching my hand!!1! Become official and hang out a total of three times over the summer.
Enter high school and start talking to a new boy in third period. Start IM’ing with him and feel incredibly conflicted because you have a boyfriend. Start a list in your diary comparing the pros and cons of each boy. One day while walking back to the quad from fifth period English, tell your boyfriend you think you no longer want to be with him. Believe this was the hardest thing you’ve ever done and feel awful. Ignore your now ex-boyfriend for six months because you’re a really awkward fourteen year old. Feel worried when you see his emo posts on Xanga. Simultaneously feel impressed that you have the power to make boys feel sad.
Study for AP Euro until midnight over AIM with the new boy and start to idealize him in the same way as the last two boys. Experience an incredibly thrilling moment when he asks you to homecoming in the hallway before third period. Write pages of anguished diary entries when he spends the remainder of the year alternating between ignoring and paying attention to you. Feel crushed when he asks another girl to the next dance. Take months to recover and do a Yahoo! search for “songs about heartbreak” and paste the lyrics into your Xanga, on private mode because you’re classy.
Receive an IM out of nowhere from a kid in your class one day during Junior year. Feel confused because the two of you inhabit completely different social circles – you are a nerdy honors student and he spends his weekends drinking with all the popular kids and gets suspended once a month. Start to feel seduced by this concept. Ignore your friends who hate him. Talk on the phone for two hours and feel fascinated by his crazy stories of running from the police and breaking his arm drunkenly falling out of a tree.
Decide to start dating him only because he really likes you, and because he likes you, figure you like him too. Go to a bonfire with your mutual friends and take a walk with him. Sit on a bench overlooking the beach and shut your eyes as he sort of pushes his lips against yours and then sticks his tongue in your mouth. Tolerate this for a few minutes and then stop because it feels incredibly weird. Engage in more make-out sessions over the next few weeks and contemplate how weird those those are too. Feel confused and break things off.
Go to Hawaii with your girlfriends after high school graduation and say, “what is that?” when they pull a handle of Skyy Vodka out of their suitcase in your condo. Proceed to take five straight shots with them, walk down the street, get called to by four boys on a balcony, go up to their hotel room like the extremely smart people you are, and make out with one. Go to college and become obsessed with drinking and making out with boys to make up for all your prudery in high school.
Start hanging out with a boy you met at an Asian frat party, aka watch movies on his laptop in his twin-sized bed of his tiny dorm room. Feel no attachment to him and end up making him very sad when you move on to another boy from another social space. Feel mature as fuck because he has an off-campus apartment and is an entire year older than you. Lose your virginity one day when he kind of sticks it in and you don’t stop him and cry a bit afterwards for reasons you can’t quite comprehend, other than you’re pretty sure you weren’t ready for that shit yet. Feel crushed when he calls you one day and says you should break up because he needs to think about settling down soon and wants to marry someone who is serious about making money instead of saving the world with a sociology degree.
Cry for a few weeks, then vow to save the world with your sociology degree. Join student government, and develop an obsession with the guy who’s repping another school at your first UC Student Association board meeting. Admire his charismatic public speaking and ability to get one thousand students at his school registered to vote in one day. Decide to secretly date, and bond over organizing tactics and your mutual confusion over trying to help create social change while also coming from a very privileged place of model minority upper middle class life.
Become official and attempt to navigate things like bisexuality and masculinity and his immigrant parents and your skeptical friends and insecurity and fear and ego. Say the L word to him after six months and really mean it and feel more vulnerable than you’ve ever felt but also incredibly alive because he says it back and now you’ve just opened the floodgates of possibility. Float on a cloud for several more months, believing nothing can disturb your haze of happiness until they do when the magic starts fading, and start to freak out because you’re only 21 and you don’t know what you want yet and break up because you’re moving to different places and you want to figure out your identity on your own. Realize in retrospect that you probably mistook “love” for the feeling of infatuation you had for him, instead of seeing it as a practice and a commitment – a verb – but decide you’re too young to commit to all that yet.
Relocate to the Bay, realize you don’t know anyone here, start an Okcupid account one impulsive night, and proceed to casually date 42 people over the next few years. Become exposed to people from all different backgrounds and careers and lifestyles and slowly grow your self-confidence. Figure out more of your deal breakers in a relationship, which now include the belief that technology can solve all of humanity’s problems, a consequence of going on dates with many guys in tech. Learn how to say no to unwanted sexual advances and how to have a better relationship to alcohol and how to use your intuition. Learn how to have mature “I’m not feeling this but I’m open to friendship” types of conversations. Learn graceful rejection and how to not take things personally. Overcome your inferiority complex to white people.
(Also go to the Castro with your queer friends and kiss girls and sort of question your sexuality for a while, but that’s a story for another time.)
Give up on dating for a while and move back to LA in order to spend your time with your friends and family and practice love with them. Start working at a civil rights organization and join a running club and a leadership fellowship. Realize that you don’t need a guy to complete you, because you are already whole – even as most of your friends start to tie the knot and invite you to their weddings and get a whole bunch of awesome kitchen appliances from the Crate and Barrel registry. Develop your political consciousness by learning from the inspiring work of community groups helping to empower low income people of color to change their own day to day conditions.
Meet a guy who is doing this. Hang out with him and talk about your mutual fantasy of living in nature and watch in awe as the youth he works with start their own community gardens and restorative justice circles and realize that this is how the revolution starts. Blaze and go camping and run at the beach and talk about obscure travel and transforming molecules with love and animal psychology and indigenous governance and the politics of Game of Thrones and what reality even is and how we are inseparable from the earth. Make peace with the fact that you can’t always put a label on your relationships with people and appreciate it for what it is. Feel inspired and go to Southeast Asia and discover a whole new beautiful world and come back and pursue a new direction for your life.
Realize that all you can do is live in the present, and stop worrying about what the future will hold. Follow your intuition, do things you love, appreciate how far you’ve come since Mrs. Schubert’s fifth grade class, and have faith that this whole romance thing will all work out in the end.
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