A Teenage Crush Stoops to an Impressive Low

It's that time of year again-VALENTINE'S DAY! And who wouldn't love to read a story of requited love and pure romance? I'm sorry I can't offer one...

This is a story of humiliation and absence of self-respect (or really any form of respect).

Let's journey back, shall we? The year was 1997 (yes, this DID take place in the last century) and I was a sophomore in high school with a mouthful of braces and nothing to lose. The lucky object of my affection was a boy who we will refer to as "Don" because I can't bring myself to use his actual name; that's just how far this humiliation extends.

Don was a predictable choice for being a suburban teenage crush: generic good looks (tall, dark-haired, no noticeable facial disfigurements), athletic (track team-big deal), and, well, he had a pulse. I don't recall him being very clever, but to be fair he probably didn't want to have too many lengthy conversations with the moron underclassman who was stalking him...

Anyhow, my mother (BLESS HER HEART) suggested I confidently take the reins and ask him to our winter formal dance. Don (BLESS HIS HEART) very kindly refrained with a convincing "Oh, man! I'd LOVE to but someone else just asked me this morning..." (Weeks later, when I saw him at the dance, his date had "gotten sick" and was nowhere to be seen. It took me about a decade to realize that maybe there was never a date to begin with....)

A couple months went by and our school was gearing up for it's annual "Mystery Match" fundraiser. Students were to fill out "compatibility" questionnaires for the student council to sort and ship to some lame company that ran them through a magic machine and sent them back with a list of everyone's "top matches". Students could then pay a couple bucks to get their results and find out who a computer decided they were to spend the rest of their lives with. To this day I have no idea what that money went to, but oh well...

Since Don had about as much an attraction to me as he did to his calculus book, I decided that Mystery Match was my ONLY CHANCE. If he could just see, in printout form, that we were meant to be then the rest would take care of itself. I filled out my form to the best of my ability, sat back, and waited for the magic to happen.

If the story ended there, it would be cute. Naive and idiotic, but also a little cute. But it doesn't end there...

Now I don't want to brag, but I "knew people" in high school. Almost all of my friends held pretty impressive positions in the student council, but again, not trying to brag. Anyhow, when it was time to sort the match questionnaires, they asked if I could help. Sure, why not? What else am I doing after school? I joined my friends in a room filled with hundreds of papers containing intimate details about nearly everyone in our school and we began sorting and boxing them up to mail to the magic company that was going to make all of our dreams come true...

And then one of my wiseguy friends found Don's questionnaire and began waving it around. At that moment, I knew what it was like to be Adam in the Garden of Eden. I resisted for about seventeen seconds before grabbing it and reading the entire thing. This was BAD: not because I was using my student council connections to view pseudo-confidential student materials, but because some of his answers WERE DIFFERENT THAN MINE!

I thought about it. What harm would it do to change one, maybe TWO of my own to ensure a more positive result? I mean, I could easily like pizza more than Chinese food, or enjoy the mountains more than the beach. My integrity would still remain intact, right? All I can say is, I wish I had kept track of how many answers I had changed because when the results came back, I was matched with Don at 91%. I was thrilled, until I realized that most people's highest match was in the 60's, maybe 70's... the odds of having a match in the nineties was almost impossible and reeked of foul play. As I followed Don out of class that day, I couldn't help but overhear his conversation with a buddy.

"It's so weird, my highest match was, like, 90%"

I trailed close behind, my nose nearly hitting his backpack, waiting for his inevitable marriage proposal. Instead, he abruptly changed directions and walked with his friend down another corridor. My sources say he was spotted later that night, making out with a freshman who wasn't even ON his list of mystery matches...

At the time I was devastated that my air-tight plan didn't work. However, looking back 15 years later, I'm pretty happy with the man I DID end up marrying. And I didn't even need to doctor any test results to land him! Now that's love...

Happy Freakin' Valentine's Day ")