I’ve always been pretty open about the fact that I’ve only had one girlfriend in my life. The relationship only lasted six months, but I still find myself thinking of Amy every once in a while; I end up wondering whether I made the right choice.
I met Amy when I transferred to HLV my sophomore year of high school. I didn’t really pay a whole lot of attention to her, because honestly, I thought she was kind of annoying. I was also interested in another girl at the time, Jamie. I had a thing for Jamie almost instantly. She was smart, funny, and didn’t care what anybody else thought of her. I love those qualities in a person.
Anyway, Jamie and I were in almost all the same classes, with the exception of P.E. and a couple other classes. So we became close. I even bought her a necklace that Christmas, I was THAT into her. The class that came to heavily influence my relationships in high school was choir, which Jamie, Amy, Douche, Kitty, and later Mandy were all in with me. The second semester of my sophomore year I signed up for show choir for three reasons: I had just been in the school musical in the fall and felt I could use a few dance lessons, I loved singing THAT much, and Jamie was in it. Amy was ALSO in show choir with us, and that’s how I got to know her a little better (but still felt a little annoyed by her).
In the Spring every year, the Show Choir and Jazz Band took trips to other states to perform. I feel like there was more to these trips, but all I can really remember is staying in hotel rooms and sightseeing. Those were the more interesting parts, anyway. Well, that year we went to St. Louis.
Now, Douche was in Jazz Band (as were Kitty and Jamie… Maybe Amy, I can’t remember), so he was also on this trip. Our nightly regimen consisted of sitting in the hotel room and watching pay-per-view. I remember watching the movie “Say It Isn’t So” with a huge group of people on the bed in my room (four of the six total being girls, mind you). Anyway, Douche and Jamie had just started dating, so I was going through my “get-over-it” ritual of trying to ignore the girl I had feelings for in an effort to move on.
I was already feeling slightly depressed because of this the day we went to the zoo. Now I didn’t have a watch, and this was before every kid in America had a cell phone, so I had to stay close to someone I knew had a watch. Douche had a watch. So I had to trail him and Jamie in order to know what time it was. Amy was with us, as was Kitty and another friend of mine, Drew; though Drew and Kitty wandered off occasionally to join some of their other friends on the trip.
While hanging out at the zoo, apropos of nothing, Amy waited until we were alone and said this:
“Nobody likes you.” Then she walked away.
Boom. Instant depression. From that moment on, while I still followed the group (no watch, remember), I said nothing and hung back as far as I could without losing them. And because Amy and I were alone when she said it, nobody knew why I was suddenly upset. And for those of you who have not had the pleasure of being around me when I’m upset, I do not like to talk. At all. I don’t smile, I don’t speak, I don’t even look at people. I make it pretty obvious when I’m upset about something.
Well, finally, Jamie took me aside and asked me why I was upset. I had feelings for this girl, and she was one of my best friends, so I told her what happened. She tried her best to comfort me (didn’t work) and rejoined Douche and the rest of the group.
I assume she started telling people what I had told her, because a few minutes later, a slew of people started coming up to me, one by one, and telling me “I like you, Joel.” I shrugged it off, because, well, I didn’t want to hear it at that point. I was already gone. At the end of the day, we got on our bus and went back to the hotel. I sat in the hotel room alone while everyone else wandered around the halls and swam.
After about 20 minutes, there’s a small knock at the door. It was Amy.
“I didn’t mean what I said. I really do like you.”
I said nothing. I went and lied on the bed and continued to watch TV. She came and lied down next to me.
“I’m not leaving until you talk to me.”
Still nothing. Shortly thereafter, people started coming back up from the pool. As more people started coming into the room, my mood began to brighten and I became myself again. When this happened, I took Amy out in the hall and told her myself that what she said upset me. She hugged me and told me she hoped I didn’t hate her. I told her I didn’t and invited her to hang out in the room with us. She accepted and that’s when we rented the movie I mentioned earlier and watched it.
Fast forward: It’s now June. School is out for the year and I’m stuck at home. One day, Amy calls me out of the blue and we sit and talk for about an hour, when her dad comes home and she has to get off the phone. Now is a perfect time to reiterate for you, for those of you who don’t know or just never noticed: I can NOT read signals and hints from girls. Like, at all. If you go back and read the first story I told, you’ll see that it is a curse that I must live with. Well, Amy calls me a few more times that week before her friend Anna calls me from Amy’s house.
The conversation went something like this:
“Blah blah blah, bullshit bullshit, Amy likes you, you know.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Amy has a crush on you. She told me not to tell you.”
Then Amy got on the phone.
“Is that true?” I asked.
“…Yes…”
The game had now changed, ladies and gentlemen. I went from feeling like nobody would ever love me (outside family) to feeling like I owned the world. So from that moment on, I started calling her a little more. And we’d spend HOURS on the phone. Our first “date” came when she asked me to go to the Marengo fireworks with her and her family. Sure, why not, anything to spend time with her. So I borrowed my mom’s car and went and picked her up. That’s when I met her nine (!) brothers and sisters. Yes, that’s right, nine. It was… overwhelming, to say the least.
Anyway, so she and one of her sisters rode with me there. We walked around Marengo, holding hands and watching the fireworks. We ran into some people we knew and chitchatted.
About midnight or so, I took her and her sister home. We held hands the whole ride home and listened to the music on my CD player. When we got there, her sister went inside and Amy and I started saying good night. Now, I only remember one song from the CD we listened to because of this: “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith. It was playing as she started to get out of the car, but I grabbed her wrist and she sat back down. I stared deeply into her eyes (I love eyes, by the way. You can know a person in an instant by just gazing into their eyes) and asked her to officially be my girlfriend. She said yes (obviously, or there’d be no story) and we started dating officially on July 5 at about 12:30 A.M. I remember the exact day because I made the stupid joke that I almost lost my dating independence on Independence Day. Very very stupid joke. I was a dumb kid; Still kind of am.
We spent the rest of the summer hanging out (many days in secret while her dad was at work. Her mom loved me and tried to help us have alone time constantly). When school rolled around, we were VERY excited to tell our friends we were dating. Everyone knew about us. And when I say everyone, I mean EVERYONE. I had my chemistry teacher, who I’d never even met before I had class with him, ask me about our relationship. Seriously, it was everywhere within the first week.
We would also meet up between classes and duck into an empty stairwell or hallway and have quick make-out sessions. As of now, I’m VERY wary of using the word LOVE when speaking about how I feel about someone, but she and I were saying “I love you’s” very early on. And yes, she said it first. Well, she didn’t really say it, she wrote it down and her mom showed it to me. Same thing. We started working on the fall musical “Bye Bye Birdie” at that point and would sneak off, again, to make out in stairwells and hallways (even though I was driving her home every night, so we could have just waited until we got to the car).
In October, she told me she and her family were moving to Cedar Rapids. This sucked. We cried. A lot. Our friends cried. A lot. Anyway, we decided Cedar Rapids wasn’t that far away so we would talk on the phone and I’d go visit on the weekends. We did that for a while, until my dad wouldn’t pay for my gas to drive up there and both our parents began bitching about the phone bills. Then I would only go up every other weekend and we would only talk for, like, 20 minutes on the phone at night.
One day, during one of our phone conversations, she told me she hadn’t made any friends since she moved up there. This was after Thanksgiving some time, so it had been quite some time since she had moved. I asked her why and she told me:
“I don’t want to make new friends. I want to go back to HLV and be with you.”
I believe very strongly in friendship. In my opinion, friends are the most important thing to have in your life. My friends are my family, too. If I have a problem, I go to my friends, and MOST of them will be there to help me. If you break up with your significant other, your friends are the ones who will help you get over it. And it’s easier to lose love than friendship. So when she told me she was refusing to make friends, I told her:
“You HAVE to make friends. I can’t let you not have friends.”
Yet, she remained adamant about not making friends. So I dropped the subject for the moment. And we talked about how much we missed each other.
During this time apart, I noticed a few girls trying to get closer to me, including Jamie. And since I had feelings for Jamie longer than I even KNEW Amy, I found myself being attracted to her again. But I was with Amy, and I would NOT be a cheater, ever. Cheating is the most inexcusable act a person can do and I do not support people who do it. I’ve actually ended friendships with people because of it. Seriously, I am that against it.
Well, in January, Amy and I had the friend discussion again. And she was still refusing to make friends, and she said it was because of me. I was keeping her from having friends. Now, I know she didn’t mean it in that way, but that’s how I saw, and continue to see, it. So I did some thinking and finally took a drive up to see her. She was very distant and still adamant about coming to be with me. I didn’t want that. So I went home and thought very hard about what to do next.
I thought about how Amy was when we first met. I was annoyed by her. She was a Christian girl, which I was fine with. She had lots of friends and was happy. Now, though she was still Christian, she wasn’t following it as much and not going to church as much and cursing a LOT more. Anyone who knows me knows I have a filthy mouth, and it was rubbing off. She had no friends and seemed to only be happy when I was around. I had become her crutch and was corrupting her. There were… other things… that contributed to me corrupting her, but I won’t go into that. That stuff is private. But the most important thing: I loved her, and I couldn’t abide her turning into someone she wasn’t. Someone like me.
I decided I needed to break up with her.
Now, I’m not proud of this, but because I couldn’t drive up to do it in person, I called her and broke up with her over the phone. Now, I told her the reason was because I had some family stuff going on and couldn’t deal with everything. While at the time, that was true, that was not the reason. It was all of the things I have just told you, dear readers. Jamie seeming interested, Amy not having friends, me corrupting her… All of it.
Well, we remained friends through all of it, continuing to talk on IMs and occasionally the phone. But shortly after, Drew asked her to prom with us. I was a little uncomfortable at first, but eventually became okay with it. After prom, they officially started dating, which I was happy about. Drew was like Amy: He went to church, didn’t swear, and was just generally a good person. All the things I wasn’t.
After high school, Drew asked Amy to marry him. And they were engaged for 3 years before they finally broke up. Drew is now married to a different girl. Amy, on the other hand, is engaged again to some other guy. I met him once, and he seemed like a good guy, and he makes her happy, so I’m happy.
Occasionally, I wonder if I made the right choice in breaking up with her. I haven’t had a girlfriend since her, every girl I’ve had feelings for has decided I’d make a better friend than a boyfriend (then they stop talking to me), and I’m just generally lonely and unhappy… I sacrificed my own happiness for hers. And because of that… I think I made the right choice.
