When I was younger, I used to think there were Rules. In elementary school, life was orderly. People (mostly teachers) told us the Rules very clearly, and success was easy. All you had to do was follow the Rules, and life would turn out all right. I followed the Rules, and life was all right. Even being the scapegoat of my class was somewhat okay, because I got used to it, and it was consistent. There was order to it.
When I went to junior high, I kept waiting for someone to tell me the Rules, but no one ever did. At first I thought I was the only one who didn't know the Rules, because everyone else looked like they knew what was going on, but eventually I realized we were all muddling through together.
Later, after many expensive years of education, I learned that we're all just making it up as we go along.
Back in grade school, there were rules about friends. I had a couple of best friends and some more normal
friends. Everyone knew what the categories meant. Best friends always sat next to each other in class or in the lunch room and were generally inseparable. Friends were people one chatted with occasionally. Everyone else was, well, everyone else.
In ninth grade there was a weird fad among my classmates which consisted of boys asking girls to marry them. One boy named David (not my good friend David, another one whose last name I can't remember) chose me for some reason and asked me (repeatedly!) to marry him. He asked at least once a day for several weeks. I always said no, because I was nervous and afraid of what would happen if I said yes. I was flattered by the attention, and I was curious, but I was more scared. Eventually I screwed up my courage and decided to say yes if he asked again, but he never did.
That relationship scared me because I didn't know the rules. I didn't know what I had to do to make everything okay, so I stayed with the status quo. I don't know what would have happened if I had said yes before he stopped asking, but I wonder sometimes if my life would have been subtly different. (I also wonder why the heck he picked me, the antisocial twit, out of all the girls in our classes. I guess I wasn't as unpopular as I thought.)
When Kevin and I first decided, nearly three years ago, that we both liked the other That Way, it took me a few days to get my head around the idea of having a boyfriend. It took me a few months to get used to the idea or to say the words my boyfriend
without hesitation. This time I took the plunge, took the risk of not knowing what was going to happen next, and it turned out all right. In fact, it was much better than all right. The thing is, I don't think I ever thought much about what having a boyfriend actually meant. How is a boyfriend different from a friend? I honestly don't know, and I'm trying to figure it out, because there aren't any Rules, and because now we're just friends
, and I'm trying to figure out what friendship is before I lose that too.