I Crushed on a Guy for Three Years and Dumped Him After Three Months

We all remember our first big crush—The first time we recognise what it is to consider someone the only part of the day worth looking forward to.

For me it was a rough around the edges, scruffy, sparkly blue-eyed boy from two grades above me.

My local hockey club had a hard time recruiting male players for the older divisions, so, if you were a girl in either that division or the one below, and you were fast enough and strong enough, they let you join the boys comp.

I was tiny but mighty on the hockey field, and could hold my own with the lads. That’s how I met Jake. He was a mediocre player, but his spirit and tenacious personality made him stand out on the field. He was an expert at sledging the opposing team, cheeky, funny, but most of all, he didn’t treat the girls like any less apart of the team than the boys.

The day he gave me a pat on the back followed by a bear hug, lifting me in the air while I made that embarrassing squeaking noise girls make after I scored the winning goal, I was hooked.

I lived and breathed that boy, admiring from a distance for the next three years.

Well, a sort of distance. We were friends, but as often happens in high school the younger girl spends a long time in the “kid zone” before one day blossoming into the young woman that finally catches the eyes of the older boy.

I was firmly in that zone for two of the three years, watching on in agony as girlfriends came and went and then, one day, I “blossomed”.

I sensed a shift, but was never game to say anything lest I jinx it. But the way he looked at me was different than before, and there were small changes in the way our friendly conversations became laced with flirtation.

I’d wait idly by the computer after school waiting for the ping from MSN Messenger announcing a new sign in—I used to have to pull the old ‘sign in and out a few times’ to see if he’d notice I was online before admitting defeat and sending the first message. Suddenly I started getting the first message within seconds of him appearing online.

Before I knew it we were talking all the time, walking each other to the pick up point at the end of the school day and there were the casual brushes of the arm or the elbow knocks as we’d stroll slower than necessary to the park where the parents waited to pick everyone up. IM’s became phone calls that lasted hours.

There were the hot and cold days where it went from being sure there was ‘something’ there to wondering if I hadn’t made it all up.

And of course, there was the ex. The one that couldn’t seem to retract the claws no matter what. The one that didn’t want him, but didn’t want anyone else to have him, always waiting in the wings to give a tug on the leash before his affection strayed too far.

I used to fantasise about how it might feel to kiss him, how his hands would feel exploring my body. He was like a drug— I was addicted to thinking about him, and to wanting him. So much so, that I had inadvertently self-sabotaged what it would be like when I eventually got him.

…

One uneventful afternoon, as was the usual routine, he called me a few hours after school finished.

“Sasha wants to get back together, but I don’t know. What do you think I should do?”

To this day, I don’t know what came over me. I snapped and decided that if I wasn’t going to shoot my shot then, I never would and I had to move on from this guy one way or another. I had wasted too much time and energy thinking about someone that wasn’t even mine.

“What should you do? You should cut her loose and take notice of what’s in front of you that’s what. You’re debating whether to get back together with someone you’ve told me countless times you don’t even like, meanwhile I’m sitting here tearing my hair out hoping that one day you might finally decide that I’m the right girl for you.”

It was very Taylor Swift of me, if it wasn’t years before the release of “You Belong With Me” I’d probably have been accused of copyright infringement.

“You… you like me? As in, like like me?”

“Um… yes.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?! I’ve had a crush on you for like… a year.”

…

The next month or so felt like a dream, I finally had the thing I’d been wanting for as long as I could remember.

Things didn’t change too dramatically, we were already spending the time together but the will they/won’t they dance we had been doing for the past year ceased to exist, obviously.

Then reality set in.

The first red flag hit me square in the face when we were chatting about things “getting serious”, at least, as serious as they can get when you’re fourteen and sixteen.

I probably should have mentioned earlier that his dad was a minister, but it serves well that I left that detail out until this point because that’s exactly where it sat during my years of crushing and fantasising—in the furthest, darkest nether-regions of my brain.

It was long enough in that I was beginning to get suspicious as to why we’d never done more than peck on the lips and hold hands. When I asked as much, his response was this—
“I want to kiss you properly, and I will, when the time is right. But I don’t want you to worry about me pressuring you for sex or anything like that, that can wait til we’re married.”

Married?

And so began the most suffocating two months of my life. I had built this person up so much in my mind, that the grim reality of what a relationship would actually be like had completely evaded me.

I was intoxicated by the chase, the longing and the anticipation. The dream I’d built up over time about the thing I thought I wanted.

What I got was a possessive, insecure, emotional boy whose hormones were in direct conflict with his morals. Nothing at all like the boy I thought was the best thing since sliced bread.

Our light flirty banter became deep, long winded conversations about “our” future. If I tried to lighten things up, he would cry and accuse me of “not loving him anymore”.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the day of my hockey grand final. I was nervous, and I asked him not to come— he had a knack for making everything about him and I needed to focus.

As I was warming up on the field, my friend nudged me and looked toward the hill where I saw him walking toward the field, the crystal blue eyes I’d dreamt about for so long visibly bloodshot from crying.

He watched me, not the game, like a hawk for the full hour and twenty minutes.

I knew then and there, I had to end the relationship—Three months after I started dating the guy I had a crush on for three years.

He cried, he begged, he pleaded. I felt like an awful person. But thankfully, I held my ground and I walked away.

Sure, I felt lost for a while after that. It was weird going from someone being my focus for so long, to having them not even in my life anymore.

But I was fourteen. And I learned a bitter truth about fantasy versus reality. You can’t love someone you don’t know, and the anticipation and thrill of the early days can cast a rose tint over everything. That part is addictive. Relationships? They’re messy. People are messy, and flawed, and you have to love more than an idea of a person to sustain a relationship.

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This post was previously published on medium.com and under a Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 4.0.

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