Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Curious Minds

You learn to develop relationships with people at a young age. When you first start kindergarten you learn to make friends and how to develop a different relationship with the teacher and class so everyone can get along and have a good learning experience. Then you get to middle school and those friendly relationships start to become more than just friendly and the teen mind becomes curious. Then the curious mind starts to explore and act on its curiosity when you get to high school, some before that but that’s another story. So exactly how curious can the mind get and how far are teens willing to go to act on impulse?

I was in the 7th grade and it was the middle of the school year, everyone was ready to get out of school. Winter always seemed to be a time when the teachers just hated us and didn’t want us to get the fresh air that we needed, so we were stuck in that big ugly building from 7 until 2:45 daily. Sometimes during lunch we would go to the gym and play some kind of sport to keep our minds off of the nasty weather outside. But that didn’t work too well because during a game someone would start arguing with somebody else and then they would start fighting, which was actually quite entertaining for the ones who weren’t in the fight.

Although we had to find ways of entertaining ourselves during the winter, when spring finally decided to show up we all just went from bad to worse. That’s when all the girls decided to put on shorts or skirts and little tops, and the boys would walk around in wife beaters and basketball shorts, oh those shorts! Those shorts would show off all the right parts of boy. By all the students showing off some skin and not leaving much to the imagination everyone started flirting with the opposite sex. So it didn’t take long for relationships to develop and soon everybody had a boyfriend or a girlfriend.

I will never forget the day I met him. He had a class with one of my friends, and he just had to know my name and what I was about. But he definitely was not my type and I had other things to worry about than some guy that couldn’t even have the guts to ask me my name and “game me up” through my friend Tessa, who was also starting to get tired of playing messenger.
It started to get warmer outside so I decided to throw on some shorts myself; I was like a tomboy, so it was rare to see me in something that showed off my figure. But that was a big mistake. This obviously made the guy want me more! But hey what can I say if you got it, flaunt it. So I finally decided to at least give him my number and see where it goes from there.

He would call just about every day. We mainly just had small talk. You know a few 10 to 15 minute conversations a day. I wasn’t really that interested at first. He was tall, very skinny, but he had the most beautiful eyes that matched his caramel skin tone. He started wearing off on me. I started to find him attractive. Maybe it was just the fact that he didn’t give up, he was a very determined 14 year old.

About three weeks later we were a couple. Everything was going fine and I was happy in the relationship. We would go to the movies, walk around Easton, which was a very popular mall at the time. We could talk about anything. I had male friends and he had female friends and none of us were the jealous type. Yeah, I thought this relationship would last forever.

We were dating for six months when he said something that I would never forget. We were talking on the phone, as we always do, and he asked me about past relationships. I answered the questions he had and then came the big one…. “Are you a virgin?” . Now this wouldn’t have bothered me later in life, but that fact that we were only in the 7th grade it kind of bothered me a bit. Then he wanted to know if he could be the one to, well, you get the picture. And I was devastated I wanted to continue our relationship but I didn’t want to make that a part of it either. So I politely told him no and I told him that I needed some time to myself for a couple days.

The nerve of this guy! His curiosity, or whatever it was, was way more advanced than mine at the time. I thought about that question over and over and I wondered what the big deal was. I didn’t see any harm in what he was asking, or what the consequences would be seeing as that it is my body. But then I thought about it some more and realized that I would only be doing it to satisfy his curiosity and not fulfilling mine, which was not as curious as his.

Like any other female, I asked one of my closest friends if she had ever experienced something like that. She told me no but her curiosity was about the same level as his, but she more discreet about it. So I talked to this guy and tried to find out why this was on his mind. He said that he had done this before and he wanted to see if it would be the same with me.

We never took our relationship to that level, but we did date for about a year. We even kept in touch after our relationship was over, we still had a friendship instead of a love relationship. We would talk about everything and even our families still would talk to each other. And yes, his curiosity was still more advanced than mine, even in later years.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's just boys for you. Some girls are curious about those kind of things but like your friend are very quiet about it. The thing is, it only gets worse during college, so Good Luck and don't give in.