The Friendship Zone- My Real Life Love Story- Part Two

A sixteenth birthday is a big deal for a Mormon girl.

In case you weren't aware, Mormon teens aren't supposed to date until they're sixteen, and that was prophetic counsel I kept.

Though not for lack of trying.

My sophomore year of High School was a big year for me, though I didn't know it at the time. Living through it was torture. ALL my friends had their sixteenth birthday, got their driver's licences, and went on dates. All of them except me. Still fifteen, I walked everywhere like a child, and tried to learn how to talk to boys.

Summer Birthdays suck for Mormon girls.

Around that time, I'd heard a lesson in church about not dating until you're sixteen, and I had decided to actually not date until I reached that magical birthday, which felt like a big sacrifice at the time, despite my strangely quiet field of boys.  Besides, the sixteenth birthday rule explains why no one had asked me out or liked me back. They must all have known how pious I was.

Still, I really wanted to learn how to talk to boys.

Turns out, boys weren't that much harder to talk to than girls were, which in Sheenaland, means REALLY HARD to talk to until I've done something embarrassing and we're already friends, and then super easy to talk to. I had a couple of boys on my roster that I could walk past in the hall, and say..."Hi" to, (not to brag) and a few magical boys that together we could carry actual conversations, (totally bragging). These magical boys became something more than my roster of crushes. So high above it, in fact, I need a new name for for this particular kind of boy. Let's call them... "friends."

Dear cute boys from my high school. If you considered yourself my friend, you should consider yourself on the list of boys I liked. No, more than liked, I befriended. I did not know at the time that being friends with boys meant that I was friends with boys.  To me, it meant there were BOYS( magical, pedestal sitting aliens that I've been crazy about since elementary school) with which I talked. Now in the dark and tortured corners of my head, these BOYS with which I talked, were actually potential BOYS WHO WOULD DATE ME.

You know, once I turned sixteen. Cause I'm all pious and stuff.

My sixteenth birthday was not magical.  Do you know who asks you out when your birthday is in the summer?

This is me legitimately asking, because I have no idea.  The sad answer is no one.

I spent the day in Community Summer Driving School, (which is worse than it sounds) and that night I watched the window and my phone for all those BOYS WHO WOULD DATE ME to... date me. I had waited for this day, and it came, then it went, and no boys were asking me out. If facebook was a thing back then, my status update that day would be depressing and embarrassing and possibly involve jazz hands and the words COME AND DATE ME.

I think I learned how to talk to boys wrong. Because even after that magical birthday these BOYS with which I talked did not magically morph into BOYS WHO WOULD DATE ME. Somehow they became BOYS WHO WOULD DATE MY FRIENDS.

Sucksville. Population, me.

It seemed like all of my friends went on their first dates while I twiddled my thumbs, and read, oh, and had a life.

I had a life. Dreams. Goals. Big plans. In the Anthony Era, I discovered what I wanted to be when I grew up. That's something not everybody knows, especially when they're fourteen. I was going to be a Jr. High School Drama teacher. I'd teach English in my non-Drama periods, and put on plays, and in the summer do Community Theater. This was my goal, my future, and my dream. I wanted to be just like the woman who changed my life and inspired me. I wanted to help kids like me, and tell stories for the rest of my life.

I knew the step I had to take to get to that dream meant college, and because my parents clearly told me they weren't in the position to pay for school, that meant I would have to get a scholarship. Knowing my mad skills at math, (something Chase should have paid attention too) and my inability to play sports, or have any kind of skill set above standing in front of people and telling stories and playing characters, I knew my only option was to work my tail off to get a Theatre Scholarship.

 I started that work young. Sophomore year, in fact. So I was really busy and focused on acting, and scared of these boys I couldn't talk to, and then weirdly overconfident around these BOYS with which I could talk, plus I occasionally wore random clothes I bought from the thrift store, had weird hair, and would belt out show tunes while walking down the hall.

Who wouldn't ask that girl out?

Answer-- every boy I knew.

It happened again and again. There'd be a boy. We'd become friends, and while trying to get to know if I liked him or not, I got to know them, and they changed from a scary distant person on a pedestal into a friend, only it didn't ever feel like that. It felt like love, although I didn't even know what love felt like. I'd like them, but not realize that they didn't like me. Not until one day, sometimes weeks after I started liking them, once years, I'd hear these words, "I don't like you like that."

Six times in a row that happened. I remember the last time. It was the summer after my first year in college, and I was talking to this boy I really liked after work. He walked me to my car, (protecting me from the scary monster boys who lurked in shadows) and we talked for almost an hour until he said, "You know we're just friends, right?" 

Psh. I nodded. "Yeah." Psh. "Of course." Psh. "Obviously."

"Okay cool," he responded. I sat down in my car, smiled, and waved goodbye. As I pulled my mom's minivan back out of the parking spot, my lip started curling, and my eyes widened and my fingers tightened around the steering wheel... until I'd had enough and slammed on my breaks. 6 times. 6 times. What is wrong with me? I pressed on the gas and hard turned the wheel. No, I thought. This is not happening again. I am SO sick of the boy I like turning into my best friend!

And then a clear and quiet thought entered my mind. Yes, but your husband will love it.

I removed my foot from the gas, waved once more to this boy who watched me randomly jerk the van around like I was having a seizure, and then drove away.

I love that my husband is my best friend.  The friendzone is in the corner of our relationship.

I didn't realize that at fifteen, but I had learned to talk to boys in the right way. It just wasn't the right time, or the right one, or maybe I just wasn't ready.

The reason my sophomore year of High School was such a big year for me, though, wasn't because that's when I learned how to be friends with boys. It's a big year, because that's the year I met Darren.

I didn't know it at the time, but one of those BOYS with which I talked, would somehow, magically, morph into a BOY WHO WOULD MARRY ME.

But that story was just starting.

My Real Life Love Story--Part One

So for the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be telling you guys a story. My story. The story about how I met and fell in love with my hot handsome husband, Darren.

This is the end of that story, but to get a full picture, I have to start at the beginning. The first time I ever fell in love.

I was in elementary school. His name was Chase, and he had dark hair that fell in an exact line above his eyebrows, green eyes, and a cute smile. He sat in the desk behind me in class. I didn't say much to him except occasionally things like, "Here's your paper," or "Would you stop kicking my chair?" He was adorable, and at recess I'd watch him as he played kickball with the other boys.

Then one day, he copied off of my math test. The teacher kept us both in from recess, so he couldn't play kickball, and I couldn't watch him play kickball, and we were in serious trouble.

Well, I was anyway. Chase, the jerk, had told the teacher I was the one who had copied off of HIM, and despite my protests, I'm the one who got in trouble.

Jokes on you, Chase. I suck at math.

In Elementary, I learned that boys could be jerks.

But I still really liked them. To say that I was boy crazy would be an accurate description, but my lesson from Chase taught me to cover my paper better, and to not put all my eggs in one basket, so from then on out, I had a tier system. If you were semi cute, and semi nice then you found your way onto my list, Elementary and Junior High School boys. The roster would change consistently, but I had about five starters at all times. At least until I was fourteen.

By this time, I had learned that boys could do worse things than copy a math test and blame it on you. Much worse things. When you like someone as much as I liked boys, you put them on a pedestal, and as such they were a distant and an unknowable thing. I really liked boys, but I thought of them as almost another species. The idea that they were people never crossed my mind. They were boys.

And by the time I was fourteen, the idea of boys were tarnished by the world I lived in. I'd go for a walk, and check behind bushes for an attacker. I'd have a buddy when I went to the restroom, because you never know. I'd heard of IT happening to girls that I knew and loved, and I knew how common IT was, and part of me was waiting for my turn at torture and scared of all men everywhere.

I knew good men. My dad is a good man, my brother and his friends were good male kids, but boys? Boys were distant and unknowable creatures. I both loved them and feared them, and wanted one of my own.

About this time I started going to regional dances, which in the Mormon culture is a place teenagers 14-18 could go and dance to the music their parents heard in high school, and where the boys would sit and talk about video games, and the girls would hide in the bathroom and cry over the boys who were sitting and talking about video games. I was not the kind of girl who cried in the bathroom. I was the kind of girl who stood near the boys, keeping my face in the practiced eyes-wide, mouth closed, expression that I thought made me look the prettiest, but actually made me look slightly deranged, as I waited for one of the boys on my roster to try to climb to the top of the list by asking me to dance. I did not speak to them, I just hovered, in their vicinity, looking like a crazy person, and also feeling like I was at my prettiest. The boys still never noticed.

That's where I was when I met Anthony. Anthony was adorable. He looked, and I kid you not, like a young Leonardo Dicaprio (This was him, I'm not even kidding) with dark hair, and I was very into this young Leonardo Dicaprio with dark hair. I didn't even see him coming, he literally bumped into me, and then asked me to dance, and I was smitten. Gone was the list. There was only Anthony.

 But I was terrified of him, and didn't say a single word the entire time we awkwardly shuffled back and forth in tiny pointless circles. But I found out from my friends afterwards that he went to my school. Oh, I liked him.  The next year, he was in my History Class, and the teacher, a blessed woman, had set up her classroom so that half of the desks faced the other half of the desks, and Anthony sat opposite me. Technically a few rows to the side of me and a couple seats back, but it didn't matter, because I could see him and he could see me. I tried to do the whole eye flirt thing my friends could do, where you stare at them until they see you, and quickly glance away, but I wasn't very good at it. I'd quickly glance at him, and then wait for him to glance at me, and then he didn't... and then other people in the class started noticing me always staring at this one boy and started teasing me, so then I vowed not to look at him ever again, and then I broke that vow again and again. But I never talked to him. Except one day when he bumped into me in the hall, and put both of his hands on my shoulders and told me (and I quote) to, "Watch where you are going."

Now I'm wondering if maybe Anthony needed glasses.

Anyway, he disappeared as quickly as he came, this cute boy I never talked to. But I was older, and wiser after Anthony. I learned the important lesson, that you have to talk to boys in order to fall in love.

And thus began the Third Age.

We shall call it, the Age of the Friendzone.

The Woman Who Spilled McDonalds Coffee and the Power of the Media

I'm not sure if I have mentioned it before, but I am a Simpsons fan.  Well, a Simpsons fan of their first eight seasons.  I haven't watched the show in years, and I'm not even sure if they are still on the air, but the first eight seasons were pure gold.   

There was an episode in season six called Homer badman where Homer is wrongfully accused of sexual harassment of a baby sitter.  The episode is hilarious, and I highly recommend watching it.  It is as relevant today as it was when it was aired about 20 years ago.  The episode parodied how media could demonize a person by the way it spins a story.  Media tells stories, and sometimes real people are cast as the antagonist when real life is never that simple.

I remember when the news broke about a woman who spilled McDonalds coffee on her lap and sued McDonalds and won millions of dollars.  The whole thing was so ridiculous because everyone knows coffee is hot.  If you spill coffee, of course you are going to get burned.  How is that McDonalds' fault?  The way the facts were presented made this story a poster child for frivolous lawsuits with immoral lawyers and their greedy clients winning the jackpot.

Jokes about this woman were everywhere on television, especially on the late night circuit.  Seinfeld (another show I love) even made a parody out of it with Kramer spilling coffee on himself while smuggling it into a movie.   This woman and her pain was turned into a joke.

But that was the story the media presented, and I never questioned it until I saw this link on facebook.

 

 

I'm assuming you watched the clip (and if you haven't, seriously watch it), but in case you still refuse, here is a recap.

 

 

1.  McDonalds coffee wasn't just hot it was dangerously hot (180 to 190 degrees F), well above the coffee pot temperature of 150 degrees F.  At this temperature third degree burns occur in a matter of seconds.  Third degree burns are really serious.  I think most people have only experience first and second degree burns.  A second degree burn from coffee wouldn't be that big of a deal, but a third degree burn is a different story.

 

2.  McDonalds knew their coffee was too hot.  Hundreds of other people had gotten serious burns from McDonalds coffee before, and it had been previously been suggested that McDonalds should turn down the temperature to prevent something like this from happening.

 

 I'm not saying that Stella Liebeck should've won a million dollar settlement (although she didn't exactly get millions of dollars), but only that she had a reasonable case against McDonalds, and it was not the frivolous lawsuit that was portrayed in the media.  She certainly was not a villain.

 

 

It is amazing to me the power of the media has to write people's stories, and what they include or more important don't include can paint anyone as a protagonist or a villain depending on which way they want to slant the story. I think this has only gotten worse with the internet where information or misinformation can travel faster than ever and very, very few people do any sort of fact checking before they spread the gossip. 

 

 

I read this article recently that Stephenie Meyer said she is over Twilight.  She explained her reasons here (Aug 14, 2013 entry) more clearly in her official blog.  Here is a quote from that post.

 

 

"Even those of you who love Twilight the most (in fact, especially those who love it the most) have probably noticed that there's been just a teensy little bit of backlash following the success of the books and films. I try my hardest to be thick-skinned, but I'm not much better at that than I am at brevity. So when I speak of Twilight becoming a negative place for me, it is entirely that near-omnipresent Twilight antipathy that I am speaking of. And I'm not complaining or saying it's unfair—I totally understand and even empathize with its existence. I'm just saying that Twilight isn't the wholly positive place for me that it once was."

I think she is under-playing that backlash.  At least on the internet, Twilight bashing is pretty big.  Twilight has become synonymous with bad writing and controlling stalker love-interests when there are a lot of books with much worse writing and way more controlling stalker-ish heroes. 

In some ways Twilight has been vilified by the internet in the way that Liebeck was vilified by the media.  Criticisms of Twilight that suggest the story is misogynistic and/or dangerous for impressionable teens usually pick and choose parts that support their position and largely ignore the parts of the books that don't.  I'm not saying that some of these critics don't make some very good points, only that the criticisms are uneven and in many cases over-exaggerated.  I don't think it really is so much worse than hundreds or even thousands of other books.  But Twilight has become the poster child for bad YA books like Stella Liebeck has become the poster child for frivolous lawsuits.

I know that writers need to be thick skinned, but I understand why Stephenie is over Twilight.  No matter how thick skinned you are being the butt of a million jokes is always going to get tiresome.

~MaryAnn







My Real Life Romance

I’m going to continue on the marriage theme we’ve had here on the prosers, but I have to warn you that this really doesn’t have anything to do with writing.  I just feel compelled to share my story.  

stock.xchnge

It has to be fate that Susan blogged about marriage so close to my wedding anniversary (either that or almost everyone gets married in June).    On June 20^th of this year (2013-just in case you stumbled on this post sometime in the future) my husband and I celebrated our 15^th Wedding Anniversary.  I can’t believe I’ve been married that long.  It doesn’t feel that long which is probably a good thing.  :)

I met my husband in college.  He was in grad school and a teaching assistant (TA) for one of the chemistry classes I was taking.  The class was working on special projects in lab and to finish early (cause I’m a nerd), I went to a different lab session that my husband just happened to be the TA.  He needed to use a calculator and asked the class if anyone had a TI 95 (a fancy graphing calculator-all us science nerds have fancy calculators although some have those inferior HP calculators).  I lent him my calculator, and that was the first time we ever talked to each other.

A few months later, I was in the chemistry building studying with one of my friends (a very cute guy who was married, but my husband didn’t know that).  My husband stopped by and asked my out right in front of my friend.  I said yes, and we went out that Friday.  I had so much fun with him.  I laughed more than I ever had before, and I really, really liked him. 

But we had problems, religious differences that were a big deal to me, so after a month of dating, I broke it off.  I knew I liked him too much, and I didn’t think I could marry someone outside of my religion.  But the break up didn’t work.  I really liked him, and he really liked me, so we did this friend thing for a while, where we would hang out A LOT, but you know just as friends. 

Then he went away for a weekend to his best friend’s wedding, and I missed him so much.  The day that I knew he flew back, I sat on the floor with my front door open hoping to see his red truck pull up, but he never came.  When I went back to school, I found him, and we went to lunch (which we did far too often for two people who supposedly weren’t dating).  During the lunch, I could feel that he was ready to move on, that he was done with our pretending not to date thing.    I knew I was losing him right when I realized how much I really liked him.

So that weekend, I called him up and asked if he wanted to go hiking with me, and I told him on that hike that I liked him as more than just a friend, and that we either had to start dating or we couldn’t hang out anymore.  He teased me a little bit by dragging out his answer, which was a bit annoying, but in the end we were dating again.

Picture from stock.xchnge

Everything wasn’t exactly perfect after that.  We both freaked out a little when we realized how serious our relationship was getting.  I broke up with him once, and he broke up with me once.  I really hated that drama.  Way too much crying on my part.  But once we got back together the second time, I think we both decided that we were going to marry each other.  He proposed to me at the first place we ever kissed on my birthday.  I think he knew I was going to say yes.

We got married in my brother’s backyard, June 20^th, 1998.

Our marriage isn’t perfect, but no one’s is.   Marriage is hard.   It is tough to meld two lives together no matter who you are.  There is always going to be some conflict.  My husband and I have definitely had our ups and downs.  We’ve had some big fights and times when we’ve drifted apart.  There have been moments where we have both wonder if we should see a marriage counselor, but the majority of our fifteen years, we’ve been happy.

 I love sharing my life with him.  I love climbing into bed with him every night.  When he puts his arms around me, I can feel that we fit together perfectly.

I like reading romance and writing it.  I love the male/female dynamic, that push and pull.  I love seeing people connect on a deeper level and being vulnerable with each other.  I love reliving that feeling of falling in love because there is nothing else like it.  But my favorite romance will always be my real life romance, and it is not over yet.   

I love you honey, and I always will.

~MaryAnn