I met my first boyfriend sometime in the sixth grade. The initial meeting was unremarkable — maybe we sat at the same lab bench in science class or passed each other on our way to homeroom. For the next six years, our paths seldom crossed. I was skipping lunch to edit videos for AP English. He was skipping school to get high and play basketball. We were a match that John Hughes could have predicted, but I could never.
Then, we found ourselves together in a place where all great Delco romances begin: a Senior Week shore house in Wildwood, New Jersey. We kissed on our second night and didn’t stop kissing for the next two months.
“I know you’re going to Penn State in a few weeks, but…will you be my girlfriend?” he asked, a Hurricane beer in hand, as we sat on a tree stump in the woods on a muggy August night. We had been “dating” (hanging out on various couches, Cocco’s Pizza, and Wawa parking lots) for two months, and I was about to move three hours away.
To answer his question, 31-one-year-old me would have consulted Reddit forums, dating advice podcasts, my mother, my friends, and my deck of tarot cards. I would have made a pro/con list, calculated mileage between our campuses, and cross-referenced our Google calendars. Maybe I would have swiped through dating profiles to find out if someone better might be waiting for me in State College. But at 18, I didn’t overthink, or consult, or catastrophize. We just decided we wanted to be together and trusted that we could figure the rest out as we went along. In a love-drunk stupor, I said, “of course.” We stayed together for the next three years.
Now, more than a decade later, that level of decisiveness feels foreign to me. Of course, the stakes are much higher than they were in 2009. Potential partners come with emotional baggage, and exes, and debt, and venereal diseases. We have to ask ourselves questions like, “Would he be a good father?” and “Does he have a criminal record?” But I’m still in awe and envy of 18-year-old Lauren, with her courage to look another person in the eye and say, “OK, let’s do this.”
For those of you who have never downloaded a dating app (the luxury!) maybe you’ve envisioned horror stories — unsolicited photos, graphic messages, cat-fishing, elaborate money scams. In reality, swiping through dating profiles is less “Tinder Swindler” and more “Groundhog Day.”
You’re scrolling through a sea of “Happy [insert day of the week] !” from a dozen men (mostly named Matt) who “love sarcasm” and “Sundays with the boys,” and maybe some of them are decent enough, and you go out a few times; but really, there’s got to be someone else better out there, right? And what was his name anyway? He did that weird thing with his fork and works weird hours. It’s probably not going to work out. You have another date planned for tonight, but it’s 30 degrees outside and your bed is so warm. You say you’ll rain check, but you never do, and on and on this goes for weeks, until you delete the app, throw your phone into a dumpster fire and vow to try again in the spring.
Bleak. I know.
I guess I could blame the apps, or COVID, or Philadelphia, or men named Matt. I think all of them have contributed in some ways to this sad State of Dating that so many of us find ourselves in. But also, maybe I’ve let myself become a bit jaded, disconnected, indecisive.
I broke up with my first boyfriend because I wanted to experience other places, people, bodies, heartbreaks. I’ll never regret that first relationship, and I’ll never regret ending it. There have been other boyfriends, and one-night stands, three-month situationships, and lifelong friendships — many fun, some good, some bad, one or two amazing.
But there are times when I wonder if I’ll ever commit to someone as whole-heartedly — as optimistically — as I did when I was 18 years old.
However silly or naive that girl was back then, she was also pretty brave. And no matter the current dating landscape, I think I’d like to start loving more like her, again — with fewer calculations and more intuition, with a greater willingness to choose and be chosen.