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How the Love of My Life and I Got Together

And Also How and Why We Don’t Know When We Started Dating

By Ashtin EvansPublished 5 years ago 22 min read
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How the love of my life and I met and started dating... and why we don’t know when we started dating.

Let’s get started. First off, we’re both juniors in high school. We’ve been dating for... funny thing is, you’ll learn why I don’t know how long later on. To get to that point, we need to start from the beginning. The very beginning.

Freshman year. That godforsaken year that every high-schooler looks back on and cringes at the thought and sight of either their actions, friend, or themselves. But for me and Emily, it’s where “we” started. Emily and I are some of the weirdest and most awkward people you will ever meet. Because of us being that way, we never really talked to each other more than a bit of small talk and just being in the same friend group, which is my next thing. We were always around each other because we were in the same group of friends and hung out with them in class. To my knowledge now, after we’ve been dating for a while, she always thought I was cute. I always thought she was beautiful, quirky, weird, and super funny. But, us being the super awkward people we are, we never really expressed either of those... and we had three classes together... yeah, it was bad. Now, of course, hindsight is 20/20, I wish I could go back in time and scream at my little newly entered high-school self to quit being such a b-word and talk to her. Here’s the catch though: I did do something that grabbed her attention and she loves to this day. (Here’s a bit of backstory before I tell you; Emily is a Vans Junkie. She wears high top classic Vans like pretty much only and she’s on like her third pair. She wore them every day. High top shoes cover your ankle and your socks.) For almost two weeks straight, I asked my now girlfriend, Emily, if she was wearing socks, knowing she doesn’t ever not wear socks.

She would usually just laugh and say, “Yes, I am wearing socks!”

And proceed to show me that she is in fact, wearing socks. Other than this interaction we didn’t talk much which brings me to the ‘why,’ my friends all had crushes on her.

During freshman year, I had three best friends: Jaden, Cody, and Bryan. Bryan had freshman studies with her and I, Cody had Math with her, and I don’t really know what class Jaden had with her. I too had a bit of a crush on this awkwardly funny, cute, 4’9 person. I still get butterflies to this day thinking about her. She makes me the happiest I’ve been in a long time, and let me tell you, I’ve been through and am going through some 💩. But back to the story, Bryan was the first one to say something to, “The Boys,” is what I usually refer to us as. He said she was cute and he was going to try and date her, or something of the sort. He, at the time, was a very weird and strange person. He didn’t really know personal space or any sort of boundaries when it came to people, he’s learned and grown since (thankfully... love ya, bud). She pretty much wasn’t a fan of how he went about talking to her and being around her, to say the least. He was denied... a couple times. No shame towards him, he shot his shot and well, it doesn’t always land. Then came Cody... and Jaden. At this time Emily started to talk to Cody as a friend and Jaden as a closer friend. Her and Jaden got along really well and so did her and Cody. She started to get a bit of feelings for Jaden and not for Cody, at first. After a while, she started to feel a bit more for Cody and showed it a little bit, but shortly after, she lost those feelings. Her and Jaden had a good friendship and they were very close, but he wanted something more and well she wasn’t ready. She has commitment issues (had?) and just couldn’t express how she was feeling. Jaden got tired of waiting and got a girlfriend. Her and him grew apart. Because of this, Emily, being a little jealous, went to Cody and flirted with him a bit even though there was nothing there. This hurt him after a while and they broke apart too, which would leave me. I moved to where I am halfway through eighth grade. It is a very small place here, so my first few friends were Jaden and Cody. So when I’m told by both of them that this girl is no good and I shouldn’t try getting close to her or asking her out or anything, then, well, I have to at least consider that... which I did strongly for a while. Until sophomore year.

Sophomore year was a new year, new start. Cody and I had one class, Bry and I had one class and Jaden and I had four classes together. Emily and I had sixth period (last period) bio together. I saw this as a new opportunity to get close with her, without my friends breathing down my neck about it or giving me a hard time.

The year starts and me still being my awkward self, I never really talked to her much besides the occasional, “Hi.”

As the year went on and I got to talk to her more and we worked on a project together with a friend of ours, those feelings from freshman year that were hardly distant through summer break (it’s only a month and a half break, so they were still kinda there) were starting to grow stronger, and stronger. I originally sat at the back of the class in a little seat next to a lab table with no one around besides the set of two desk rows that were in front of me and spread throughout the room, she sat next to our friend Curtis, a row between us. As the months of talking a bit and getting to know each other went on, I started to slowly move up in the seats to where I was sitting next to her. Curtis wasn’t a big fan of this and we fought over the seat all the time because he didn’t want to sit in the seat at the back of the class all alone. Emily and I grew pretty close as ‘school friends,’ as in we only pretty much talked in school, and in our case, only the last hour of the day. But, one day, that changed.

One day, Emily posted a picture to Instagram with the caption of, “low-key really liking this photo,” and I commented something on it, honestly I forgot. This was on December 17th, 2017 at 3:05 am. This was the first time we had talked out of school. For whatever reason, she deleted my comment and I still don’t know why to this day. I’m pretty sure she forgot this even happened.

So I, being weird and trying to find a way to talk to her more, direct messaged her picture to her and said, “how are yuo gonan just delete my commnenntttttttt,” it was 3 in the morning, don’t mind the typos.

She responded the next morning with these three letters, “Rip,” and that was it.

We continued to grow a bit closer every day during bio class and I eventually got ‘rights’ to the seat after a while of fighting with Curtis for it... and making it habit to get to class before him so I could sit down first. The next time we talked outside of school is the thing she says our relationship is based off of, “aliens.” She posted a picture of a rocket going to space that was launched by Space-X on December 22nd, 2017. I once again, direct messaged the picture to her saying in response to her caption of, “WHAT IS THIS IM CRYING,” I said, “aliens. that’s the answer.”

And then I followed it up with the truth of, “it's a rocket putting a satellite in orbit haha” and she and I went back and forth with that and how she didn’t know what it was.

After saying it might be aliens and not a rocket ship, I made a joke, which she still quotes to this day, “i just hope they come down and pick me up yanno i'll even pay for gas too.”

She loved it. At this point, I already had sweaty hands and was like bouncing off the wall with excitement that I just made her laugh and she hasn’t dismissed me yet. (I am still getting these feelings and a bit of nostalgia going back through the DMs). This started to get me a bit less scared of rejection, so we talked more and I put effort into trying to make her laugh, talk to her more, do things with her like projects or answer questions for worksheets in class.

One day in class when we were talking she just said out of the blue, “Do I have you on Snapchat?”

This is what I think our relationship is based off of, along with aliens.

I replied with, “No.”

Because I didn’t have her added. A day or two after she did add me was New Year's Eve. That night I said, “Happy New Years” to two people. My Dad, and Emily. I only texted her this because it was again, another reason to talk to her. We talked for a bit and it was a good time. On February 26th, she sent a picture of something on the board in bio class and saved it to the chat with Snapchat.

The next day, she came into school and we were talking about absent days, and she said, “Because my Mom let me skip school for my birthday [which is February 5th] I can’t miss school for a long time, even if I’m sick. The only time she’ll let me is if I don’t sleep because of depression or something.”

She said that last part kind of jokingly. This part I have to add, Emily does have a bit of an issue with depression and did for a while but it got extremely better from freshman year, to sophomore year to now. But I remembered her saying this and sometime after she said this, she missed a day. Me, now having yet another reason to talk to her, hit her up on Snapchat asking if everything was okay since I remembered what she said. I don’t remember her exact reply and whether or not she was sick or if she was out for that exact reason, but something was up. So, me again being the plain out weirdo I am, sent her a bunch of cute dog pictures and said that dogs always are needed and make everyone feel better. She loved it, and we laughed about it for a while after and we started to talk on Snapchat every day. By me saying every day, I mean literally for the almost 200 days it’s been since that, we didn’t talk for more than like 20 minutes or at all, on only roughly 8-10 of them. That is insane, and I love it. At this time Emily had a boyfriend who was a not good guy in the long run. She and I became very, very close. My feelings were for sure at this point very more than just friends. I told her one day that I liked her after school accidentally through a screenshot I took of what my friend and I were talking about. That friend happened to be Bryan.

In the long run, Bryan asked if he could tell her that I had a pretty massive crush on her, and I said yes. So one day after school, as I did every day and still do to this day, I texted her "hey" and we started talking and I asked what she was doing and she said she was talking to Bryan.

I knew that he told her that day from him so I asked what they were talking about and she said, “Nothing much to be honest, just catching up.”

Because this was around the time when Bryan moved, and they didn’t have any classes together and didn’t talk at all really. Basically to cut to the point... well, that’s what I did. I told her I knew that Bryan told her and I said it was true and I said sorry a million times over since she had a boyfriend at the time and hopefully it won’t be weird. My whole pitch was, and I still stand by it, that I’d would rather it be awkward for a little bit that she knows I have this huge crush on her then it go away or we forget, then for me to be weird and us come apart because of how weird I’m acting or me acting on that crush when she had a boyfriend. But, her being the amazing person she is, just said she realized that I had one and that Bryan told her and that she was good in these situations. One thing to know about Emily is that she has her two “girlfriends” or super best friends, and the rest of her friends are mainly guys. So she’s used to her friends or close friends getting crushes on her and them just like walking over it together.

Throughout a very, very painful time of me liking this awesome person I talked to literally from waking up to falling asleep, and her not liking me back, she and her boyfriend were having issues. Well, they had issues from the very beginning of their relationship which boiled down to this; Emily never really liked him. Emily had a thing with a guy that it probably wouldn’t have ever worked out with and to get him off her mind, she got with her, at the time, boyfriend as a rebound pretty much and a distraction. A couple of months in, she realized this and wanted to get away pretty much. Me seeing this and her going through it, I honestly did try my absolute hardest to give advice or insight on what I saw, without my personal feelings making me bias or getting in the way. They ultimately broke up, obviously. Because she didn’t really like this guy all that much, she had some feelings for me too, which is why we talked from sunrise to sunset. During this time period of us not dating while she was single, to me as her boyfriend, was a very hard time and very confusing. It lasted for about two months.

This time was so confusing and sucked because, as previously stated, Emily has commitment issues, which is why I put the “(had?)” next to it since we’ve been dating for a while now. These two months were filled with a lot of into the morning talks and texts. I started to fall in love with her... we weren’t even dating yet. I got bit by the love bug one day and haven’t healed since. She also had feelings for me at the time, but a lot of concerns. One being, she just got out of a relationship and we’re in high school. Emily has a pretty busy and stressful schedule, so the last thing she needed was to have a hard time in school from mean high school kids who don’t know the whole story picking on her for getting out of a relationship that was never really a full mutual thing and was actually pretty terrible for reasons I will not discuss, out of courtesy of her, to hop into another one. So, we were something you call a “thing.” We weren’t dating, but we obviously had some chemistry and something was going on. As I’m slowly falling in love with this woman, she is slowly becoming more okay with us being a real couple or having a real relationship. One day me, Jaden, Emily, and our friend were supposed to meet up at a park to work on a project. Our friend never showed up and because of that, we didn’t work on the project, so Jaden walked back to his house which wasn’t far and Emily and I stayed and hung out for a bit. We talked for a while and the wind made us super cold, so I put my arm around her and we shivered together and she wouldn’t take my hoodie because I was wearing a really thin shirt underneath. We got up and moved around to try and warm up and get into the sun and out of the shade from where we were sitting on the park tables. As we were walking at one point, one of us said something that I hate myself for not remembering, but we turned to each other and kissed. It was a terrible kiss, and something she doesn’t know and will find out and hate me for lying about, but also my first kiss. Me moving from another state, and wanting to impress this girl who I thought was freaking amazing, I said some random stuff to her that made me fit in, in a way. One of these things was that I’ve kissed someone before and that I suck at making out and that’s why I don’t do it, which was really my cover-up and fallback story for I’ve never done it before. At this time I never truly asked her out, like the original girlfriend-boyfriend way that everyone does that signifies a relationship had started. But after we kissed that first time, I said “that sucked” and went in for another one and we kissed again and it was better. We walked around a bit more and sat down in the sun and drew with rocks into the concrete as if it were chalk until her mom would pick her up.

She said, “My mom is going to give me so much shit if she sees us sitting like this.”

My arm was around her and we were huddling together because it was cold.

I replied, “I bet.”

And laughed a bit.

She said, which made my heart leap out of my chest, “Well, I could just tell her that you’re m my boyfriend.”

Which was not what she told her when she got out of the car when she dropped her off, it was the opposite of what she originally told her actually since she was asking questions of if I was the guy she was talking to all the time. This was the happiest day of my life. Now, you might be asking yourself why we don’t count this as the day we got together, and well, that’s because you don’t know about the two month period before this happened, that time I like to refer to as the time of “Limbo.” This is the same two months I was talking about after she broke up with her boyfriend and to this point. Now, you will see why it’s so confusing and why we don’t have an official time or day on why we started dating.

This next event takes place at a theater we have where we live, and it was a school hosted event. We both wanted to go because her friends were going and I would get extra credit in my English class for going. It was April 27th and we went to this with my friends after hiking and she went with her friends after being with them. We met up before entering and said hey to each other. Let me remind you, that at this time we both liked each other and it was pretty obvious, but she never came outright and said it. We went into this play with my friends Jaden and Cody sitting a row in front of us, Anthony, who is a best friend of ours, and his girlfriend, Alli (they are still dating to this day and they started dating when Emily and her ex started dating as well.) Emily and I sat next to each other and next to Emily was Anthony, who sat next to Alli. Alli is one of Emily’s “girlfriends” or best friends that I mentioned way back. She and Anthony both knew about our “thing” we had going and they both were pushing Emily to date me since it was very clear I liked her a lot. The play that we started to watch started and about halfway into the first half, Emily started to do one of her very bad habits, which is chew and bite on her knuckles, the same way people bite their nails. This isn't good for her and it bruised her knuckles, so I grabbed her hand and told her to stop. After the second act had started, she continued to do it so I grabbed her hand and locked hands and fingers with her and made a joke that now I’m just going to hold her hand to stop. Her being funny and going along started doing it to her other hand so I grabbed that one too. So now I’m there in a awkward position with us holding both our hands over this chair and

Anthony sees us and freaks out a bit to Alli and said to Emily, “I knew it!”

Referring to him knowing we liked each other.

Emily not wanting to accept the fact she did, threw my hands off and just said, “It’s nothing.”

This kinda had me split in emotions, on one hand, it hurt, that meant nothing to her and on the other, I was happy because I knew that it actually did. So a bit later in the play she started doing it again and I grabbed her hand and put it down but not taking it like I did that first time, and a bit after that I did it again. On the third and final time I did it, she grabbed my hand and locked it like we did the last time and continued to watch the play as I smiled and did the same. She likes to say I hinted at holding her hand as I was letting go of her hand when I was taking it away from her mouth, but in reality, I never did and she just wanted to hold my hand.

After we were holding hands for a while, I leaned over and said, “You know, you don’t actually have to hold my hand, right?”

And she just said she knows. I repeated this a couple times but in a more mocking manner that she grabbed my hand that time. After a while, she let go and that was that. See, the dilemma was that we both held hands because we liked each other. As much as you think that is kindergarten stuff and that it doesn’t mean much, you can’t because we did both like each other a lot and wanted to date so that’s why we held hands. This could’ve been the first time we were a couple, but if you think this was like “ehh, it was a weird thing that happened, you guys kissing at the park and her saying you’re her boyfriend now to her mom was when you started dating,” let me tell you this story that happened a week to a few days before we went to the park and kissed.

It was a normal day for us. We both wake up, say good morning, and I get on the bus the same time she wakes up because I live far away from the school. She gets driven the two minutes that she needs to get there. We go on with our day and everything and at this time I was walking her to every class and we were talking and sitting at lunch with her friends, being Anthony and Alli being a couple and her other best friend Ariana. We talked about an “us” for the previous almost two months it’s been and I was getting tired of waiting in this state of limbo where we’re doing everything a couple would do just minus saying we’re a couple and dating and being romantic and intimate with kissing and holding hands, which brings me to the point of: until after we kissed at the park, we never held hands again after the play. She was dealing with a few personal things between family, friends, health, and school. She was flipping out and frustrated about our situation as well and I pretty much told her the night before that it is ultimately in her hands and I’m just waiting for her to be okay with an “us.” I guess I got that message across because later that day, after having a normal routine, having walked her to all of her classes, and talking all day the day before, after our last period which we had together, we would walk to her locker and say goodbye before I would leave to get my bus and she would stay to wait for her mom to pick her up. But this time it was different. As I was going to leave for my bus, I gave her a hug and when I was getting out of hugging her she pulled me back and kissed me on the cheek. Now you might just say that was her being kind. But let me remind you once again, I told her the night before and previously, it was in her hands. An “us” and our feelings towards each other was in her hands. So, that was no ordinary, “thanks for everything, goodbye, friend” kiss on the cheek, that was something more. So, that could’ve been the start of our relationship, and this was the story of our relationship and how it started and how we really don’t know when we “officially” started dating. Obviously, we could just say that day at the park was it and call it a day, but this way is much more fun. Now when people ask how long we’ve been dating, we just say too long, and I love it. I love her. This concludes my story.

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