A Couple of Boys I've Loved Before; The Finale

I realized that the first section was WAY too long. I'll try to be succinct here. The eighth grade introduced me to another Really Cute Guy, who weirdly turned out to be a life-long friend of Brown-Eyes, but went to a different elementary school than us. He was very cool and I spent the next two years trying to get either of them to be my boyfriend. We were in most of our classes together because our school not-so-subtley tracked us by academic ability and we had many fun times--including almost flunking world history our sophomore year because we knew more about it than our doofus teacher so we mostly ignored him. He retaliated on our report cards. Then, the two of them started to "go steady" with two really awesome girls that completely eclipsed me so I surrendered to fate. I gave up pursuing either of them.

There were several fun crushes in the ensuing years:

• the boy from another town I met while riding my horse around the county fair
• the summer of the Student Body President dating me, then dumping me
• the guy who worked at a restaurant with my sister
• the guy who came up to Wyoming to spend the summer on his grandpa's ranch
• the guy who supposedly was tutoring me in geometry but mostly we'd just make out and then we decided it was ruining a perfectly good friendship and went back to just math

I dated a guy my whole senior year just because I needed a date for a number of functions due to my involvement in school government/clubs and he had a really cool car. He was very nice, and fun and I respected him, but he was not talented academically and I was a horrible snob about that.

I went off to BYU and found that only certain freshman girls get pursued by the RM's. I was not one of them. But as a sophomore somehow I was introduced to an RM who really liked me and dated me often, came home to meet my family (I was so oblivious to the ramifications of this--I was just proudly showing off my farm and my beautiful valley). He invited me to spend Thanksgiving with his family at Lake Mead (he was from California). I agreed, but then overheard my roommates discussing excitedly (thinking I was asleep) about me returning from Thanksgiving with a diamond and I suddenly realized that I was definitely not at the same stage of the relationship as the guy. So I just got a ride home to my parents for Thanksgiving without telling Mr. California that I was leaving town NOT with him. I was a really rude, inconsiderate person. But he was NOT The One.

Guess where I found The One? Sixth grade, it turns out. I did go to California the following year but it was to live with a girlfriend, who, like me, was flunking out of college. We moved there to be wild. It worked. We were. I dated the Really Cute Guy from world history for a few months since he was in the Navy there. And since Brown Eyes was also in the Navy there, and the two of them were inseparable, it was the three of us going to the movies, eating out, them rebuilding their motorcycles in a rented garage, me sitting around watching after I got off work. It soon became clear that World History Guy was in love with someone else--I was just the girl in town--and Brown Eyes' girlfriend of four years got engaged to someone else for Christmas....and soooo

Thirty-three years later we're still married and I have forgiven him for making me cry in Science. And he's really sorry for it, too. (Even though he has absolutely no recollection of doing it--nor of any of the other momentuous occasions I recorded in my diary. But, they didn't happen to him. So why would he?)