This is inspired by SweetCupcakee's entry about her
first boyfriend in 3rd grade. I read it and I thought to myself, "3rd grade? That's so young!" Then I thought over my early history with boys and pondered when is an appropriate age to start dating.
In Kindergarten, I was quite popular with the boys. I guess I peaked early... I was proposed to by three separate boys in my class - they didn't just want to date me, they wanted to marry me! - and one of them even stole jewelry from his mom to give to me (too bad she was one of the teachers at the school and thus found out right away. He didn't think that one through too well...). Unfortunately for them, I wanted nothing to do with them at the time. It's not that I thought boys had cooties or anything like that. But I was a very levelheaded five year old, so my response was "I'm 5 years old. I'm too young to get married."
While two of my close friends started having crushes in 3rd grade, I remained levelheaded about boys and viewed them as crazy. I thought my friends were anomalies and that I was the normal one. Then the summer before 4th grade, I moved. A few days into living there, I met my going-into-the-5th grade neighbor across the street, and the first thing she did was tell me who all the acceptable boys at our school (in her grade at least) were to date. Date? In 4th grade? I felt like I had entered some kind of weird parallel universe. How grown up she seemed talking about dating. And it sounded like everyone was doing it. But I still didn't understand it and I wasn't about to date just for the sake of jumping on the bandwagon.
Then in 5th grade, it happened. I got my first crush. His name, we'll say, was Kyle. Kyle had just moved to our school and it unraveled me. Of course, me being the tender age of 10, I chose to display my affection by calling him names and hitting him. Unfortunately Kyle didn't like me back, and I was crushed. I experienced my first heartbreak, and while I thought I would never get over it, I was later redeemed (see 7th grade).
In 6th grade I went on my first "date." We'll call him Bob. He was dared to ask me out and I was dared to accept. My mother drove us to the local movie theater and I think we went to Dairy Queen afterwards. We had never really spoken before, we didn't hardly speak on the "date" and we never spoke after. I think the fact that we were accepting dares is evidence enough that we weren't ready to date.
Also in 6th grade I had my first "boyfriend," who I really wasn't interested in. But at least he actually liked me, so it was a step up from Bob. A few weeks into dating, I had made up my mind to break up with him and then his brother died. I'm not kidding. I dated him for 5 more months, and by dated I mean avoided-but-didn't-break-up-with.
In 7th grade, I had my first "long-distance relationship" - he lived an hour away, which is a long distance to a 13-year old without a car. We dated for two months, but in that time I saw him once. You would think I would've learned my lesson about long-distance relationships then, but I didn't.
7th grade was also the year that I ran into Kyle again, and having gone through puberty, was looking more... mature... than when he last saw me in 5th grade. He clearly liked what he saw, we hung out once, I didn't really like him anymore and then it was my turn to reject him. Justice!
It wasn't until 9th grade that I had my first relatively legitimate relationship and love triangle (and all the drama that comes with it...). This is also when I realized I'm a bit of a commitment phobe (or maybe it's just that I'm still level-headed) because right away John was all "I love you," and I was all "no, I don't think you know me well enough and have enough life experience to say that." I also had my first kiss with John, which was terrible (it was a first kiss for both of us). I never wanted to kiss again and I didn't understand why people thought kissing was fun. The kiss is actually a major part of why we broke up - I just couldn't stand the thought of kissing him again. Luckily, my second kiss a few months later was with someone much more experienced and thus began my love of kissing.
So, in my world, 9th grade is when you're mature enough to kind of start dating. Kind of. I mean, yeah, I dated before that. But it doesn't really count. And even in 9th grade, we were clearly very immature. But I guess you become less immature through experience, so you gotta start dating sometime. But I still say anything middle school/junior high and before doesn't really count.
What do you think is the appropriate time to start dating?
Comments (1)
I was also kind of a late-bloomer when it came to liking guys