Crushes - Volume 2

I started this little saga a few weeks ago here.  One of my lifelong friends commented that I'd need a separate volume for all my sports crushes...I had to think about that for a minute.  Of course I remember my well known crush on Joe Senser of the Minnesota Vikings, and then there was Michael Jordan (more overall awe than crush), but I'm a bit stuck after that...

And the honest truth is that I don't want to write the next section of this tale down - it's one thing to talk about crushes, but when they turn in to something more obessive and then to something real, it is dicier to talk about it.  But away we go anyway... 

The very next guy in the story arrived in my life on my first day at college as a freshman.  I met him on Day 1 of freshman orientation and that was it for me.  My blinders went on to all others, and to my immature mind this was The Guy.  I don't think the word "stalker" had been coined yet back in the early 1980s but I was a stalker.  I knew his routine and his habits, and I followed him or arranged to cross paths with him all the time.  Worse yet, we were friends and in many of the same classes (don't think I didn't arrange that though), and so it was a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde thing for me.  The particular docudrama in my head, starring this young man, was powerful and all consuming.  And it lasted, unbroken, for two solid years - and then after I transferred colleges, it remained in my head for years.  Perhaps a little more off and on when I wasn't there in person, but it was persistent.  For years. 

At my new college, time was running short.  I was 19 and hadn't yet had a boyfriend.  Considering my entire goal in college (I see it clearly now in retrospect but would have denied it vehemently then) was to find a husband (that MRS Degree, you know), I was feeling the pressure to move beyond crushes and have a real living and breathing guy.  A month before my 20th birthday, I threw out a net so wide, flirted with every boy I came across, that I was bound to snag someone.  And I did.  I can only shake my head now thinking about it.  Technically, I then had a boyfriend, let's call him Joe, by my birthday.  Thankfully he went home every weekend so I only had to deal with him 4 days a week...since I didn't really like him, this helped immensely.  I dumped Joe after a month or two.  I really wasn't that interested in him as a person, just as a person to fill this empty role in my life.  He was moving quickly toward "serious" - we'd had a conversation where I had been just sure he was going to say he loved me (what??) and I ran quickly the other way.  Made him cry, right on the sidewalk on campus, when I told him I didn't want to date him anymore.  But at least I'd put my toe in the water!

Toward the end of my junior year of college, I met this really weird guy who was our dorm neighbor.  He was super smart (on a full academic scholarship) and funny, but he was skipping all his classes and drinking a lot and not at all concerned about it.  We hung around quite often with Smith and his roommates that spring.  That summer I think I even wrote Smith a letter.  In the fall, he came back to school, tan, buff and intent on remedying his wrongs from the previous year (like all the F's and incompletes).  He was an engineering major.  We were dating by Halloween.  I don't even know how to describe the relationship.  Some of it was nice and positive and normal.  Some of it was really good for me - he is probably the first person who pushed me to decide my own opinions on things instead of just parrotting what I'd been brought up to believe, which certainly raised some never before experienced rifts with my relationship with my parents.  Some of it was not so good - but most of that took a few years to fully develop.  We dated a year, were engaged for a year, married, and then divorced three years later.  So a five year relationship all together.  With the wisdom of years, I can probably see clearly what I only realized as a hint at the time, but we really should have broken up in 1988, instead of getting married...

After Smith and I were divorced, I headed out for Seattle...that story goes on here ..as for the ongoing saga of crushes, To Be Continued...