Category Archives: Shane

1996, second boyfriend, first internet lover

The Art of Courtship

I think we, as a society, should go back to the way things were in those Western romances I used to read. You know: when a guy wanted to date a girl, he’d go ask her pa if he could court her. Then they’d sit in the common room with her parents and sisters and visit with each other, or, if they were really naughty, they’d sit out on the porch together with glasses of lemonade while Ma watched out the kitchen window and Pa glanced over his shoulder from the barn every now and then.

Ah, the bliss of a simpler time. When you take the physical aspect out of the dating phase, you get to the stuff that really matters a lot faster. Hey, call me old-fashioned, but I speak from experience.

Shane (ex number two, for clarity’s sake) and I had a very western romance courtship, actually. Except, instead of sitting on the porch together with lemonade, we wrote letters and emails. Yep, we were a long distance couple. Internet lovers, if you will. Anymore, a lot of my friends are in long distance relationships, but back in high school, it wasn’t all that common of a thing. (How are you supposed to make out with your boyfriend under the bleachers if he lives in Montana, hm?)

Anyway, the beginning of our relationship had no physical aspect at all. Just words. That’s not to say it wasn’t sexy. Even at the tender age of fifteen, Shane could turn a phrase like you wouldn’t believe. His love notes were beyond compare.

It was those words, I think, that made me feel closer to him than I’d ever felt to Joe, despite the fact that Joe’s tongue had been down my throat regularly for the full ten months of our horny little tryst. The thing is, when you’ve got someone’s tongue down your throat, it’s hard to talk about your hopes and dreams and all that.

The downside of getting all that Hopes and Dreams stuff out there so quick is that you find all the skeletons in the closet a lot faster, too. Shane knew a lot of my faults even before I realized I’d let them out of the Bag of Bitchy.

Oh come on, you know you have a Bag of Bitchy. It’s full of all that stuff that you sort of stow away during those first few months of a relationship, whether you mean to or not. Then, quietly, the Bag of Bitchy comes open just slightly and an itty bitty bitchy escapes. But then the little bitchies left in the bag get all agitated that their friends have tasted freedom, and before you know it, the Bag of Bitchy is wide, wide open and all you can see is your guy’s hind end retreating as fast as it can.

And you wonder why he dumped you.

I wonder what happens to the Bag of Bitchy when you’re single for a really long time. Do you get so used to not hiding stuff that eventually you just don’t have a bag anymore? Or do you collect so much bitchy that by the time you meet a new guy and it’s time once again to bring out the Bag of Bitchy, the bitchies you’re trying to hide won’t all fit?

The Power of Love on the Internet

I met two of my four exes online. I know; I’m totally a child of the Internet age. I have no idea what it’s like to only meet guys at school or church or (ugh) in bars. Of course, the Internet is kind of one giant bar, and you never know exactly what you’re walking into.

I wasn’t actively looking for a boyfriend when I met Shane online. I met him in a role-playing chat room. For those unfamiliar with role-playing chat rooms, they’re just like regular chat rooms except everyone is playing a character… so, kind of, they’re still just like regular chat rooms, except you make no pretense about pretending to be someone you’re not.

This particular role-playing chat room was a Star Wars themed one, I think. It pains me to say that, because I want to convince you (and myself) that I was eventually able to shed the weirdness of middle school and blend with normal society. But I didn’t really tell anyone about the Star Wars role-playing chat room, so I was half-way there anyway.

My character was a gorgeous, red-haired, kick-ass smuggler with a great ass and a bad attitude—basically, everything I wanted to be and wasn’t. His character was a suave, good-looking adventurer—and I will admit that he actually did turn out to be suave and good-looking, especially for a 15-year-old.

Admittedly, it didn’t take much to impress me with boys at fifteen. Joe had been fond of writing crappy love poems in rhyming (kind of) iambic pentameter, so I was actually pretty impressed with any human male who could string words together without trying to rhyme “love” and “gave,” and “mine” and “kind.” Shane was considerably more talented than that.

Our characters actually fell in love before we did. Yep, my character and his character were kind of an Internet item, at least in our little Star Wars-ified corner of it. He read my crappy fan fiction and I read his less crappy actual fiction, and a bond formed.

Internet dating before match.com. That’s how it happened.

Now, Matt I actually did meet on match.com. Well, kind of. I had a profile up there, he stalked me, but he hadn’t paid for premium service, so he had to find out my IM name in some other creative, stalkery manner instead of contacting me through the website. Stalking as a demonstration of love: it actually usually works. At least if you’re me.

The Opening Lines

Joe, 1995, age 14:

“I can tell you like me.”

To an incredibly stupid 14-year-old like I was, who’d had a crush on the beautiful blonde Adonis all summer long and had been expecting it to be nothing more than unrequited love, “I can tell you like me,” was akin to a proposal of marriage. I was his.

Shane, 1996, age 15:

“Did you seriously just say ‘kiss me, you fool’? Because I can. Unless you were kidding. Were you kidding? Do you really want me to kiss you?”

I was actually kidding. “Kiss me, you fool,” was a line from a commercial my siblings and I thought was extremely hilarious and I just assumed that Shane would have seen the commercial, too, and also found it hilarious. But then after he got all flustered and couldn’t tell if I was serious or not, I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d been kidding. So we kissed.

Luke, 1998, age 17:

“Does this mean what I think it means?”

Luke and I had been flirting all summer. Well, he’d been flirting and I’d been being stupidly oblivious to the whole thing. Mostly. Actually, truth be told, I’d sort of been leading him on. I thought he was cute and funny and I enjoyed spending time with him, but I never really meant to take it further than that.

But, as we stood in my parents’ foyer and I realized I’d been hugging him a little too long and resting my head on his shoulder, my “holy shit” moment came. In the span of 3 seconds or so, I convinced myself that I did want this relationship to be more than a friendship, and so I affirmed Luke’s suspicions that this meant we were now something more.

Matt, 2001, age 20:

“I usually don’t do this on the first date, but I feel like we have such a connection.”

You’d think by the time I reached the age of maturity (20, of course), I would have recognized the line. Luckily for me, he wasn’t just trying to get in my pants and he actually meant it, in his emotionally turgid sort of way.

As you’ll note, the theme in all these encounters seems to be, “Ramona is stupid.” It’s not a flattering picture. Every time I’d just begun to get myself under control after months or years of a roller-coaster long-term relationship, a new opening line would pop up and I’d go right back to Stupid Land.

I know lots of people who take good, long, healthy breaks between relationships. I know teenagers who have never been on a date in their lives. They are perfectly normal. I was not. At age 20, I hadn’t been single for more than a few months since I was 13.