When I was fourteen years old, I was essentially the same way. In fact, I was the same way in kindergarten. A boy named Liam and I used to mock-fight each other with blocks as we vied for the attention of Lisa Benacquista. In junior high and high school, accidentally grazing a girl’s hand while walking through the lunch line was enough to keep me daydreaming for a week. If we were sitting in the packed bleachers at a basketball game, and my thigh was touching the thigh of the girl sitting next to me (with jeans on, mind you), I felt like I was Brad Pitt with Julia Ormond in Legends of the Fall (you know the scene). Every school dance had as much intrigue as a session at the United Nations as kids raced around discussing who liked whom, who broke up with whom, and all of the other important seventh-grade gossip.
My mom couldn’t stand all this. I guess she didn’t remember what it was like when she was that age. She used to listen in on the extension while I talked to girls on the phone, and she even opened mail from a girlfriend when I was home the summer after freshmen year of college! (I stayed at school the remaining college summers.) I hope I can do better with my own daughters. The older one, a seventh-grader, swears she hates boys and will never have anything to do with them, a position I’m perfectly happy to keep going as long as possible. However, she’ll occasionally mention a certain boy at her lunch table, or in the play, or in band, and always in passing, never the main story, but I’ll see a little twinkle in her eye, or hear the subtext in “He’s so funny!” The younger one, a fifth-grader, is a bit more of a girly-girl, and I can already see she’s going to be trouble in the boy department.
The romantic endeavors of some of my students are legitimate causes for worry. Some of them will move way too fast. Sometimes I see boys, in public, treating girls in a way that makes me fear for what happens in private. But when I see a student like the typically-brash kid I saw this afternoon, standing quietly at a girl’s locker as she essentially ignored him and giggled with her friend, looking like he’d give anything just to hold her hand for a minute, it reminds me that, for most kids, these experiences are a magical and beautiful part of the journey.