Some Observations Upon The Nature Of What Is, Thus Far, Spinsterhood

I've been thinking lately, about my life.

I mean, this blog is about my life, so I don't really need to tell you that, do I? You can just assume that it's going to be about my life. Never mind. Moving on.

But I've been thinking, and it's because of the way I see what other people are doing that makes me want to share this thought. I might sound bitter. I might even possibly sound... pathetic. But bear with me, because I am neither bitter nor pathetic, even though it will sound that way when you read this.

It started probably in my childhood, when my parents may or may not have encouraged me to believe that "kissing was gross" and that I should never try it. I used to hide my eyes when I watched people kissing in movies. This happened until I was about ten or eleven. Then I would peek through my hands. Eventually I allowed myself to watch, and nowadays I'm sort of like, "Well, it looks better than the kids in my high school practically having sex in the hallways."

But I was... I guess you could say sheltered, because my parents didn't really highly encourage the idea of playdates. We had them, and we went to birthday parties, but the idea was that you had to behave really well to have playdates, and people didn't even ask us on them very often. When I say "us" I mean the Beast (although he probably went on the most as an actual child), myself (who went on the least total), and the Beauty (who's gone on more as a teenager than as a kid). Our parents didn't encourage us to have houseguests over very often, either, because our house was a mess and they had to clean it up for us to play with friends and that was a lot of work for them, so they said, "You want friends over, you do it." And every now and then, we did, of course, but more often than not we just played with each other. I feel like the Beauty and I are closer because we played together. The Beast stopped playing with us when he was about nine, and we missed the masculine presence of his Beanie Babies and the way they always had super powers and saved the day and stuff.

So while I did have friends in elementary school, mostly starting in third grade with my neighbor and possibly one of my best friends, the Tuba-Viola Girl, I was still lonely. I still preferred to read than to actually play, and I made friends at school and we talked at recess, but I didn't spend a lot of time with friends outside of school.

And up to this point, all of my friends were female. I tried having male friends in kindergarten. That ended when the creeper kid sitting next to me told me I looked pretty on Halloween and I was thoroughly traumatized for life, thus beginning a pattern of my experiences with boys. Second grade I sort of had a male friend, but he never said anything. I was the friendly one of the pair of us, and I was mostly the shyest kid in my first-grade class. Third grade, the year my family and I moved to good old Red Lion, I chased a boy around the neighborhood because he was willing to play tag with me, and then everyone started teasing me. "Sarah LIKES him. Sarah LIKES him." OH COME ON PEOPLE, I WAS EIGHT. I liked everyone. Except people who insinuated that I liked people.

After that, I didn't make male friends anymore. In fact, in fifth and sixth grade, I had a group of several friends, who we can call the Evil Genius, Bookworm I Miss, and Channeling Luna Lovegood, and the lot of us spent every day on the playground abusing boys roundly. We invented a brief sign language, as I recall, where we referred to boys by brushing imaginary dirt off our hands. Yeah. It was fun.

In seventh grade I was introduced to the phenomenon of a full orchestra. I had been playing violin since third grade, but I had only had a few full rehearsals. Now, the Tuba-Viola Girl and I were thrust into the world of junior high orchestra. And since my father was and is a prime violinist and I already had some inborn musical ability, I was made the first chair of the second violins, which is like the alto section leader of the orchestra. And if you don't get that, you should join a choir or an orchestra. But there were two boys on my right, in the first and second chairs of the first violins. And there was a boy... on my left... who was my stand partner... and we had to talk to each other every now and then.

Years of growing to believe that boys were gross, encouraged perhaps unconsciously by my parents, made me scared of this boy. I really don't know why, now that I think about that time in my life; he was six inches shorter than me and was possibly one of the nicest boys in the orchestra. The guys sitting on my right were unimportant, although the first chair was a real primo donno about some things. But I was scared of boys, going into seventh grade, partly because they had traditionally been unkind to me and partly because I had grown to distrust the lot of them, excepting my father and brothers.

But eventually I found out that I could talk to this boy like I could any other person, which is to say, like the way I talked to girls, but without mentioning anything like Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre. (That would be as close as I got to talking about things that were pink or sparkly or cutesy.) And then in eighth grade, when the Evil Genius moved to Central and I gained two friends, the Concert Pianist and the Ballerina, I learned that I could in fact talk to boys, because now I was the first chair of the junior high orchestra and I had to talk to them every now and then. It was like, "Oh, okay. They're human." I mean, there were still a few jerks- I remember one gym class where I was incapable of playing volleyball and this boy yelled at me about it and the Ballerina, who was fortunately in my gym class, yelled back at him. I forgave him for it eventually, though, because he turned out to be nice.

See, eighth-grade Sarah? Boys are okay. They aren't scary.

In ninth grade, I learned that boys liked girls. Like, sometimes they would make out with girls in the hallway. Innocent little me was traumatized by this. I also had a friend who was in his senior year of high school, a friend we'll call the Songster. He helped me out with the talking-to-boys thing because he went to my church and he was super nice and he tickled me a lot, by which I mean poking me in the diaphragm until I was sure it left bruises. He also cracked every knuckle in both hands on the bus from seminary to school every morning. The Songster is probably my best guy friend in the world, and it's him I have to thank for teaching me that wow, boys aren't scary after all!

After that it was all uphill, especially because I joined the marching band next year and if you know band kids, it's that they're usually dating someone. Usually. I was the exception.

And it is this that I have made an extremely long-winded introduction about. I was the exception to most high-schoolers in fact; I considered myself dispassionately from about my junior year of high school; I wasn't bad-looking, per se, but I was not beautiful, either. All of my friends were gorgeous and thin, which made me larger by comparison, but I was not, and still am not, ugly.

Yet nobody ever asked me out. Nobody ever wanted me.

See what I meant about how I might sound bitter? I'm not, I promise you.

It was like I had heard my parents tell me, "Kissing is gross," or that I figured out that boys were gross, and it was like a shield formed around me, and this shield just grew larger and larger as I went through elementary school, junior high, and high school. By the end of my sophomore year, when I turned sixteen, the magical age of dating according to Mormons, that bubble was a mile wide. I had a circle of friends who I can collectively refer to as the Super-Talented Band Geeks, because we were, and because a lot of the most talented people in my grade were in my circle. All of them dated. I had no perpetually single friends because I was the perpetually single friend. And it's true that I didn't get my license and more often than not I did not do Wednesday-night yoga or go to Rita's or have movie parties with my friends. I spent time with them at school and at music practices and that was it. My bubble kept boys away.

I am not bitter about this bubble and the way it affected my life in high school. I am wondering if maybe I am bitter about the fact that the bubble is still there.

I will tell you the truth, because I'm not ashamed of it. I have been on four dates in my entire life; at least, four dates that I counted as dates because the boy asked me and it was definitely a date activity. Two of them were with my best friend the Songster; once we went to Hershey Park for my sixteenth birthday and once we went swing dancing in York. The other two occurred at BYU. I have never had a boyfriend. I have never been kissed. I have had my heart broken a lot.

I wasn't terribly social in my freshman ward at BYU, but I was one of the ward music chairs and I was forced to be in the spotlight at least part of the time, so one would think, as it is, after all, BYU, that I would get my fair share of dates. Not necessarily true. I hid in my room a lot because I was lame. I spent a lot of time on the internet. I watched all the really pretty girls in my ward go on lots of dates and I went on two.

I had this bubble, here in Red Lion, then at BYU, and now in Red Lion again. I think maybe I have to learn something about myself before the Lord will let this bubble pop. In fact, I don't think it's a bubble that pushes people away. Now I think it's a sheet of bubble wrap, the kind you wrap something delicate or breakable in to keep it from shattering. I think that God might have wrapped me in some bubble wrap until someone who knows to handle me with care comes along, someone who can be gentle with me. And that is my testament to the Lord's love for me. I think he loves me a lot and he knows that I'm special. He knows that I have to wait for someone who will treat me right, so he wrapped me up to keep me safe until that person comes along.

This started as a post about how oddly I think of boys. This ended as a post about how glad I am that boys think oddly of me. And I am really grateful that they do.