Forever Alone | Chapter 2: Proms & Palpitations (Part 2)
Forever Alone | Chapter 2: Proms & Palpitations (Part 2)
In which my teenage dreams swell to the highest heights and burst spectacularly, I learn to date boys I’m not into, and I mistake depression for love.
I published Forever Alone: One Introverted Millennial’s Half-Agonizing, Half-Hopeful Journey Through Singledom in 2021 as a 7-part podcast miniseries. I’m re-publishing it here on Substack for the first time in written form! Start reading from the beginning here.
After that awful day in chemistry class, I desperately needed to look normal. It wasn’t an option for the entire 11th grade to know that I’d been publicly rejected and was a pathetic mess.
Enter, Dylan.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Mackenzie had shown up to chemistry that day. Because she was MIA, it was Dylan I confided in, instead. He was a friend of Luke’s, and he and I were friendly, too. Mostly because he harbored a not-secret infatuation with Mackenzie, and he thought the best way to get to her was through me.
I didn’t particularly care about his motives. They suited me, because I had my own motives, too—distract myself from Luke and look as unbothered as humanly possible.
Dylan was physically there, and he listened, and that was good enough. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t interested in him at all, or that I wasn’t the slightest bit attracted to him. We were two kids who wished we could be with someone else, but figured not being alone was a marginally better way to spend our time.
So, we hung out. Mostly as friends, until I went over to his house one afternoon to watch a movie. He convinced me to watch Fight Club, and then I persuaded him to watch The Notebook. As we lounged on the living room floor, credits playing at the end of The Notebook, he rolled to one side, leaned down, and kissed me.
I froze. Not in a breathless, romantic, taking-a-beat-before-you-lean-in-for-more kind of way. But like a deer in headlights. It was like someone had put me in a full body-bind. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. Dylan stared down at me, progressively more confused and agitated as I just … laid there, unable to do or say anything. He tried to get me to speak, and got annoyed when I wouldn’t. Or couldn’t.
Eventually, I must have unfrozen and gone home, but I have no memory of that part. I chalked the incident up to being surprised—that had been my first kiss, and I wasn’t expecting it. Any girl would react that way. A couple days later, I was chatting about it with my girlfriends like nothing strange had happened—I was happy that anyone had finally bothered to kiss me, regardless of the context. If I was going to be a 16-year-old girl heartbroken over a boy she’d never kissed, at least I could be a 16-year-old that someone had found worthy of kissing. How I felt about it didn’t matter—that it had happened, period, was more important.
Dylan asked if I wanted to go to prom with him, and I said yes. Again, it didn’t matter that I had zero desire to go with him, or that he wished he could have gone with Mackenzie. It was just critical to ensure I wasn’t a girl without a date to prom.
And then, of course, because the Universe loves a comedy of errors, after the requisite three or four weeks Luke broke up with Kyleigh. I was desperate to get out of my date with Dylan and somehow end up going to prom with Luke, instead. But I’ve got to give it to Kyleigh—she was fiendish. She told Luke she’d already bought a dress for his prom, and couldn’t return it, so it was only fair he still take her, even though they’d broken up. I told Luke she was manipulating him in the most painfully blatant way, but that didn’t stop him from giving into his guilt.
So, on prom night, I had the pleasure of being picked up by Luke and Dylan, in Luke’s jeep. My dad even took a picture of all three of us, posed in our living room. And then we proceeded to Kyleigh’s house to pick her up. I still remember her allegedly un-returnable canary yellow dress.
Dylan and I were so miserable with each other at dinner that by the time we actually arrived at prom, we weren’t speaking and didn’t dance together at all. Luke, in turn, spent as much of the night as possible avoiding Kyleigh.
As I slow danced with Luke, I almost said, “You know, neither of us would be miserable right now if we’d just gone together.” But I choked it back. Because if a guy wanted you, he would let you know.
My non-relationship with Dylan blew up for good a week or two later. We got into a fight on AIM at 1 in the morning—he was pressuring me to spend more time with him, instead of focusing so much on getting into college, and I had the good sense to know which of the two was more important. We refused to speak a word to each other for most of senior year.
I didn’t see Luke over the summer, which meant by the time we saw each other on the first day of senior year, I’d had enough time to let my little heart mend itself a bit. When I heard that he and Layla had hooked up over the summer, I didn’t feel much of anything—which was probably numbness, rather than true unconcern, but it was a far sight better than public humiliation. Later that year he started dating someone I actually knew and liked, and I found I was mostly fine with it.
Looking back as an adult, I can only guess at what happened. But if I were explaining it to myself, like I might to a younger sister, I’d probably say: “Of course he liked you. But you were so wrapped up in your feelings for him that you didn’t realize he wasn’t a confident, grown man. He was a scared kid, just like you. He didn’t want to be rejected, either. It was easier for him to pursue someone he wasn’t that into than risk failing with someone he actually liked. And when you shut down and moved on, he assumed he’d missed the boat. You were both too afraid to tell the truth, so you kept missing each other.”
Twice, shortly after we graduated, in the weeks after I rode around in his jeep while my new boyfriend was on vacation, he texted me—late at night, clearly during parties, when he’d been drinking and had a little more courage than usual—and told me he wished we’d dated in high school.
Actually, what he said was that he wished he’d dated more girls in high school. When I said, “Like who?” he listed a few girls … including me.
So, there it was. He’d finally let me know. And I didn’t feel validated or vindicated. I was pissed because it was such a goddamn cop-out. Drunk (so that he could blame it on the booze later, if need be) and not even brave enough to admit he regretted not dating me when he had the chance. I was just one of a number of girls he should have pursued, apparently—though now I’m fairly sure those other names only made the list to lessen the vulnerability of his confession to me. I suspect the rest of them never got drunk texts. But the main reason it was safe to reveal his feelings now, was because he wasn’t expected to do anything about them. Because now there was Patrick.
I’d known Patrick since elementary school, but we’d never been friends or ran in the same circles. I wasn’t un-popular in high school, but I wasn’t one of the top tier popular kids. I had a core group of good friends, I was in a lot of AP classes, I was the lead in a couple plays and musicals, and I graduated in the top ten of my class. No one would have been embarrassed to be seen with me, but I wasn’t cool.
Patrick was rare in that he was also in the top ten of our class and he was popular. His best girl-friend, a cheerleader, was one of the prettiest, most popular girls in the 12th grade, and his best guy friend—boyfriend to the best girl-friend—was an incredibly good-looking captain of the football team, who happened to be a genuinely nice guy.
I don’t remember when I found out that Patrick was into me. It was a month or so before our senior prom, and yet again I was worried about not having a date. I think one of his friends must have casually asked me what I thought about him, and whether I’d be open to going to prom. I was surprised, but I said sure, because I was relieved anyone wanted to go to prom with me.
We started casually hanging out ahead of prom—we went to a battle of the bands concert and tried to shout questions at each other over the music, and once we went to his friend Marcus’ house and the three of us watched MTV together. Marcus was on one end of the couch, I was on the other, and Patrick was in between. By the end of the night, Patrick had subtly shifted his position enough times that he’d managed to close the gap between us.
I never paused to ask whether I wanted Patrick to pursue me. What I wanted seemed irrelevant. Patrick was a smart, well-liked guy who was interested in me—a girl who’d had one terrible kiss a year earlier, been rejected by the only guy she’d ever actually wanted, and was painfully “behind” all of the other seniors. I’d never even had a boyfriend, and it was embarrassing. I wasn’t really attracted to Patrick, and I never would have thought to date him until I learned he liked me, but who was I to turn down someone who wanted to rectify my boyfriend problem?
On prom night I lied to my parents and told them I was sleeping over at Mackenzie’s house. Instead, I went to an after party with Patrick in his friend’s parents’ basement. I’d never liked drinking, but Patrick and his friends were big partiers, so I sipped my beer and tried not to feel painfully awkward. At some point in the wee hours everyone just passed out on the floor. He and I ended up in a corner near the pool table—a dude passed out underneath mere feet away.
When he and I kissed, I didn’t freeze up like I had with Dylan. But there was no part of me that wanted to be there, doing that. And it wasn’t just the fact that I was in a random basement surrounded by people who weren’t really my friends, trying to act like this wasn’t the first time I’d made out with a guy. I powered through my desire not to make out with him, and the groping that accompanied it. The next morning, he dropped me off in front of my house while I prayed my dad wouldn’t look out the window at the wrong moment.
None of it was me—the basement partying, the sneaking in past my parents, the fooling around with a guy I wasn’t attracted to. But that didn’t matter. What mattered more was the narrative. These things are what high schoolers do. They drink, they party, they kiss boys, they sneak past their parents. One night had helped me check plenty of “normal 17-year-old” boxes, and now I could rest feeling less weird and “behind” than before.
If I’d known better, that’s where Patrick and I would have ended. We’d have gone to prom, then graduated and headed off to separate colleges, never to see each other again.
But it felt nice to be wanted, after so long feeling unwanted. It felt nice to be sort of included in the popular crowd, even though they weren’t my friends. I didn’t desire Patrick, but I liked him as a person. He was sharp and witty and his family was happy to have me over any time.
So, we stayed together. For more than two years.
And what started out as two smart, decent kids going on a date to prom became two young adults who brought out the absolute worst in each other, and made themselves and everyone around them miserable.
I know it usually takes two people to make one relationship bad … but I think the way our relationship devolved was mostly on me.
I loved him, but in a painfully unhealthy way. I became incredibly clingy and codependent—having someone love me felt good, and the second he turned his attention to anyone or anything else, it made me insecure. He resented me for my neediness, but was just as caught up as I was in the addictive loop of fighting and making up. He tried and failed to break up with me countless times. In the rare instances when I let him, he’d usually be unable to leave me alone for very long, and the cycle would start again.
In hindsight, what fueled my neediness was the fact that we’d gone to separate colleges—he to a school where two of my three best friends also went, and me to another school a couple hours away where I didn’t have any close friends. My 18th birthday was the day before we went our separate ways. The next day I sobbed in the backseat the entire two-hour drive to my new school—not because I was leaving my home for the first time, or that I’d miss my family—because I was going to miss my new boyfriend. Or at least, that’s what I thought when I was 18 and didn’t know any better.
As an adult, it’s obvious that going to college kicked off a major depressive episode—the most severe of life to that point. Yes, having a boyfriend who I missed exacerbated that, but he wasn’t the reason I was depressed. But I had no idea I was depressed. Depression and anxiety weren’t something I would understand or relate to for another decade, even though I’d feel one or the other nearly every day for that entire time. All I knew then is that I was sad. And I assumed it was because I’d been separated from the first boy who’d ever loved me.
So, what happens when a homesick, highly sensitive, anxious-depressive, 18-year-old introvert leaves home and can barely function, and blames it on missing her boyfriend? She transfers schools, naturally.
My mom fought tooth and nail to keep me from doing it, but I couldn’t be stopped. The next year, I moved into an apartment with Mackenzie and two random girls she’d befriended during her freshman year—one of whom was Kristen, who I’d end up becoming best friends and business partners with … so, good things can happen even when you’re a kid making a dumb, reactive decision. But at the time, I was just happy to be closer to Patrick.
Except physical proximity did not solve my problems. When you’ve assumed the reason for your deep, bone-level despair is that you’re not with your boyfriend, then it’s natural to assume being with him will lead to the opposite—sheer joy, all the time.
The codependence hit an incredibly toxic peak. I hated that he drank so much and was so into partying. I wanted him to want to spend all his free time with me. He resented me, and then drank and partied more to escape my suffocation, and the cycle would get worse. We screamed at each other. We called each other awful names. Frankly, it was abusive. We were both perpetrators and both victims.
After one of the hundreds of times we temporarily broke up, as I was poised to try to get him back, a friend said, “You know, if this is really meant to be, it will happen at some point in the future without you having to try. I think that’s why it’s called a leap of faith.” I don’t know why that, of all the things everyone had said to me for years, actually stuck with me. Maybe it was the right thing to say, at exactly the right time. But I finally allowed it to be over.
I wish, for both of our sakes, I’d let it end years earlier. I’d been angry at Luke for not having the guts to tell me how I really felt when he’d had the chance. Yet there I was for years, no guts whatsoever to walk away from something that made both of us the absolute worst versions of ourselves.
But firsts are the hardest, right? I’d never had another relationship. I had no idea if a next one was possible. I’d never gone through a breakup before. I didn’t know it was survivable. And I was a 20-year-old kid who had no idea she was struggling with her mental health. I couldn’t have known better yet.
This was Chapter 2: Part 2 of Forever Alone. Read on for Chapter 2: Part 3!