Facebook and High School Crushes
by James of Foot and Wine
I had an interesting and awkwardly exciting experience this evening. Like many, I have re-connected with old friends using Facebook. Some friends are old co-workers from many jobs ago, but some go all the way back to High School. For those of us well into our 40′s, this represents a stretch back of many, many years! Beyond the minor miracle of being able to connect with friends from decades past, this has allowed some of us to re-establish relationships with old boyfriends/girlfriends and catch up on where our lives have taken us. In some cases, we have been able to reconnect with people who we considered “out of our league”, but to whom the sands of time have left dunes that we may climb to their level.
In my case, there was a girl who was a year ahead of me and who seemed a lifetime away. The entire time that I knew her, she was involved with someone, but our social circles often intersected. She was beautiful, smart and funny and I had an enormous schoolboy crush on her.
Fast-forward 25 years later, and I find her in a friend’s “friend” list on Facebook. I send a friend request and am surprised that she accepts. Rather than being one of the many “friends” in my list who I occasionally exchange comments with, this person and I are CONSTANTLY communicating via posts, comments and status messages. In fact, we’re not just communicating, we’re FLIRTING! Finally, I get up the nerve to chat and share the fact that I had a crush on her so many years ago. To my surprise, she replies that she still remembers a gift I gave her at her 18th birthday party, and wonders why I never told her how I felt! Especially after she broke up with the guy she was with all through High School.
Ah, the possibilities! Would I have just been the “rebound” that she married that ended up being the first of her two marriages (same as my own two) or would things have been different with someone with whom communication now seems so easy. Geographically, we’re a state away and long distance relationships are notoriously hard to maintain. Facebook lets us communicate on a regular basis, but there is this strange sense of loss. As if our paths should have done more than just cross all those years ago, but neither of us knew it then.
So, thanks Facebook! Because of you I have a new/old friend and I was able to resolve, at least at some level, an issue from my distant past. Still, I am left with as many questions as answers. As social networks enable us to expand our network of friends to include people whom we had long ago lost touch with, we are more and more likely to experience these revelations of feelings that we never knew existed or that were never reciprocated. So how does one react? Where do you go when you find that you turned left at a crossroads when maybe your should have gone right?
