LESSON #31: YOUR H.S. SWEETHEART

LESSON #31: YOUR H.S. SWEETHEART

*THE NON-MAPLE SYRUP VERSION

         You know what almost never works out?  High school romance.  For the most part, high school romances end as predictably as most Hollywood films – except in one case, the story in ends in marriage, and in the other, the story ends with your picture-perfect boyfriend having sex with that really cute Delta Zeta cheerleader from his speech communications class.  Sure, occasionally you’ll get surprised, and this is kind of like the ending to The Sixth Sense – nobody saw that one coming, and if they claim they did, they’re a fucking liar.  But I can count on one finger the number of my happily married friends who started dating in high school.  On the other hand, I’d need all five fingers, plus all ten toes, plus the appendages of six busloads of friends to count the number of high school sweethearts I know of whose relationships ended the other way.  So, just playing the odds, let me tell you that if you are banking on getting married after four years of college (whether you both attend the same school or not), you’d better hope your relationship is FDIC insured – because the odds are the crash is coming, like Black Tuesday, only with more screaming, crying, and throwing shit at each other. 

          You see, here’s the fundamental problem.  Even if you two elect to go the same college, you’re both going to change – a lot – and this is a good thing.  Trust me, you don’t want to be the same person at your ten-year reunion as you were in high school.  For instance, members of my graduating class spent a lot of time on the weekends drinking Natural Light at a place called the cow-dump (which was a long stretch of country road situated between a cattle farm and the county landfill – awesome! I know).  But not so awesome at 28.  Now, I’ll concede that even those who haven’t changed much have moved on to the bars downtown – but this is really just a lateral move, not a move forward.  Maybe they’re happy – but my guess is that if you’re reading this lesson, you don’t want that life.  No, you probably want to experience the great growth that can happen during college, you want to feel the excitement of changing into a more-cultured, more mature person.  But if you embrace this, you must also embrace the fact that seldom do people ever change together – at least not very often between the ages of 16 and 24.  Guys who go into college acting like McLovin often come out acting like Ashton Kutcher; and it’s not unusual for your high school cheerleader girlfriend to come back from school over winter break a PETA-loving, tie-dye wearing hippie.  You just never know what kind of adult butterfly lurks inside your high-school caterpillar self, and if you don’t go through the larval stage of college, you don’t get to find out.  And this unfortunate state of arrested development often becomes even more pronounced in couples that decide to go to different schools, but spend every weekend away from campus visiting their sweetheart back home.  All of the sudden, the rest of the world has passed them by, and they are the metaphorical embodiment of Buster Bluth. 

          So listen, I’m not telling you to break up with your high school sweetheart.  Hell, you might be one of those Sixth Sense couples that makes it all the way.  All I’m telling you is that most of the time, you won’t end up seeing dead people, you’ll just wind up in a dead relationship.  If this happens, know that it’s normal.  Sure it sucks, sure it hurts, but as a consolation prize, you get to start dancing with thousands of other hormonally-driven adolescents without a single parental chaperone to tell you to keep your hands up. 

          *Note: When this lesson originally posted on November 6, it was accompanied by a second, more sentimental, version that was included just for kicks.  All comments referring to the “maple syrup post” refer to this alternate version, which can be accessed by clicking here.