In the beginning there was TheFacebook.com and it was bad. Very bad.

I can blame that social networking site for most of the worst dating experience of my life — and the biggest learning experience.

Things were good. Everything seemed right. Then within a few weeks of us deciding to “try this,” everything came crashing down around me.

There was another girl. Had it not been for Facebook, I likely never would have known and goodness only knows where I’d be now in that situation.

It was a simple comment, but it was enough for me to ask him what was going on.

What was going on was another girl, a late night, and some alcohol.

I confronted him about it and he did not hide what had happened, nor did he show any remorse or express any understanding that what he had done might have hurt me or at least caused me to doubt the sincerity of the feelings he claimed to have just a few days before.

I broke. Shut down and crawled under the covers. The bright pink and green walls of our dorm room were too much. I preferred the dark, a sad movie on TV, and my bathrobe. My playlist consisted of a lot of eastmountainsouth, the soundtrack from Les parapluies de Cherbourg, and an almost constant stream of season 2 of Felicity in the background.

Gutted. It was only then I realized how much he’d meant to me. And now I refused to speak to him. Refused to see him even. A friend who I had a class with (a class that met in a room where he had class, right after his class) and I started entering the building a different way and waiting until the class was cleared. She confronted him at one point, on one of the days where I was so upset that I’d made myself sick over the situation (note: didn’t know this at the time, but my metabolic disorder was just really starting to roll and make me sick at this point).

Every day, a constant ache. I couldn’t not think about him. In my mind I ran through conversations that I wanted to have with him. Words that would make him understand — not make him change his mind. At that point there was no way I would have let him back into my life. Sparing you all the details, I did find out that it was more than one other girl.

I let the distance grow. Kept away. At one point I did have to speak to him outside of class. I acknowledged his presence, but I couldn’t manage much more. After that he tried to start talking to me again. It was too soon.

The end of sophomore year came around. He was leaving. I was planning to move out of the dorms and into a house that summer so that I could continue taking classes over the summer instead of going back home.

He wanted to meet one last time. I agreed to coffee in the middle of the day, on campus. I wore a flouncy skirt and the sun shone bright that early May day. In the end, I found out the truth. He was scared of me and of what a girl like me potentially meant — commitment, responsibility…marriage. He knew I wasn’t playing around. Even though I didn’t talk about marriage, he knew. My plans for life were pretty serious. I knew what I wanted, I just didn’t have a clue how to get it.

We parted that day and I never saw him again. He would continue to call throughout the summer and try to chat with me online, every time further proving how much of an immature boy he was at that point in his life. Maybe he’s better now, but when I knew him he treated me rottenly.

But, like everything else, this was a stepping stone that prepared me for something else — a life on my own for the very first time.

Related posts:

1. My Corn-Fed, Deep Fried Okie Romance – Part 6
2. My Corn-Fed, Deep Fried Okie Romance – Part 2
3. My Corn-Fed, Deep Fried Okie Romance – Part 1