A Short List of the Boys I Have Loved

Originally written in the Fall of 2003
 
1. Eric Jordan. Eric was my first real best friend, first "kiss", and first proposal for marriage. He lived two doors down the street in a house that was exactly the same floor plan as my own, only backwards. He was like a brother, but my feelings for him ran deep. He taught me how to skateboard, and I showed him how to put a lawn chair on a skateboard to make a "wheelchair" (endless fun down huge driveways as long as one didn't fall off). We were born fifty minutes apart. We also decided that if neither of us were married by the time we were twenty-eight, we'd tie the knot on our birthday, April 6, in 2010. Unfortunately I was out of luck early in the game... Eric found a girl in the Air Force and married her at age twenty.

2. Teddy Swan. Teddy was the biggest boy in school, at about five feet tall, when I met him in first grade. He remained the biggest boy in school all the way through high school and used it to his advantage on the basketball and football teams. Teddy had soft brown hair and eyes, and even though he was teased for being so tall, everyone wanted to hug him. I first knew of Teddy's feelings when, in the middle of our first grade class as we sat on the carpet, he rolled up a piece of paper into a tube, raised it to my ear as Mrs. Bailey talked about finger painting, and whispered through his handmade megaphone, "I like you." My heart jumped and that moment marked the beginning of my love for Teddy. Being seven years old, "out of sight, out of mind" was reality... so this love had a deadline: the end of the school year.

3. Roy Coffman. Roy had strawberry blond hair, brown eyes, and was covered head to toe in freckles. He had straight teeth (a quality hard to come by in third grade) which were exposed often because Roy liked to smile. My friend, Erin, and I competed for his heart. She said that she and Roy were meant for each other because they both had red hair. I argued that my dad had red hair, so wasn't that close enough? No one ever knew who Roy actually liked back then. He remained mysterious about those matters. If I really wanted to know I could ask him... he goes to UCSB and works at the Beach House.

4. Philip Patti. Philip was my first "bad boy" experience. In fifth grade my class was made up of mostly the Bad Kids. Long before I had the strength to stand up against bad influence, I let myself become a delinquent for one year. Philip and I sat together in the back of the classroom and talked through most of the lessons without getting caught. From those conversations I learned about condoms, drugs, and Metallica. At some point Philip and I decided to "go out" (of course meaning that we would continue sitting together in class, talking through lessons, and never see each other outside of school), but two days later it was over. Probably because I had to talk him into going out with me in the first place. I've had a thing for bad boys ever since.

5. Roy Coffman. Ok, so in sixth grade I liked Roy again. Old flames never die. At least this time he liked me back.

6. Chris or Pat English. The new twin brothers who joined our school in seventh grade. First of all, they exhibited fresh faces, as opposed to the ones we'd been staring at for the last six years and watching grow out of their fat phases. Secondly, I was enchanted by their tall stature, dark hair, green eyes, and beautiful brown skin. Chris had a quieter and sweeter disposition. Pat was funny, possessed straighter teeth, and his voice changed first. I liked Pat because he happened to be in my wood shop class. The Twins did quite a number on all the girls' hormones at Templeton Middle School. Ask any girl in our class, and all of them are sure to say they liked either Chris or Pat at some point. If they're like me, they switched back and forth between the two for years, the Chosen One being whoever looked in her direction more often or shared a class with her.

7. Steve English. No relation to Chris and Pat. The truth is I never really had a thing for Steve. He was the sweetest, most polite boy in our class, and he had a high GPA. For some reason, in the minds of all my friends, this meant we were perfect for each other. We were both polite, sweet, Christian, relatively well-liked, and good at school. Basically Steve and I got talked into going out by the whole eighth grade class, only to converse a few weeks later and mutually agree that we didn't even like each other. We're still friends.

8. Jacob Rodrigues. Jacob was the good-looking, popular sophomore bad boy who one day decided that Heather Eaton was the "cutest girl in the freshman class". This information, passed to me by a friend on the volleyball team, instantly formed a good opinion of this Jacob in my mind. I hadn't noticed him before that point. Once he was brought to my attention, I liked what I saw: dark features, a great smile, and a football player's build. We mostly communicated through mutual friends, and eventually I got brave enough to start ditching study hall so I could sit and listen to him play in the quad during his guitar class. He called me occasionally, and we even met at the movies a couple of times with a bunch of friends (behind my parents' backs since no dating was allowed until I was sixteen... I had just turned fifteen). We would hold hands while his friends snickered behind us, and I'd catch him staring at me out of the corner of my eye. I assumed if I returned the gaze, he'd try to kiss me, and since I was petrified of this scenario, I stared straight ahead and didn't move during the entire flick. The magic lasted for about a month until Jacob realized the good girl appeal that had attracted him wasn't what a teenage guy with raging hormones needed, especially when he was going to have to wait a year until I could legally go out with him.

9. Jordan McCaffrey. Jordan and I met at our youth group's winter camp sophomore year. On the bus ride up, he and his friend happened to be sitting across from my friend and me. We all started talking, because that's what we did on bus trips: talked to the people around us and sang praise songs loudly and off key. I developed a crush on Jordan in the six hours it took to get up the mountain to the snow. He had scruffy dark hair, brown eyes, big white teeth, and huge biceps. Unfortunately, when the bus stopped, and everyone stood up, I noticed immediately that looking into Jordan's eyes required me to look down. No up, not straight, but down. My crush continued for a couple months after winter camp and Jordan called me several times a week to talk for hours at a time. He came to my sixteenth birthday party and gave me a beautiful cross necklace. But the height thing bothered me, so the next time he called I told my mom to say I wasn't home. (Oh, the travails of being gifted with above-average height.) When Jordan first locked eyes with me across the bus aisle, he couldn't have guessed that he would be my first experience blowing a guy off.

10. Nick Jangaard. Nick was the class clown and a troublemaker, and looked the part. He had dark red hair, green eyes, and a devilish smile. His sarcastic sense of humor meant that people who didn't know him were offended by his remarks (actually, sometimes so were the people who did know him). We became close friends until eventually Nick decided that we should "be together." We'd hung out every weekend and enjoyed each others' company, so why not? We had even been voted Junior class Winter Prince and Princess (an enormously high honor... so much so that as far as I know, THS has never had a Winter Court since). So we switched our status to "dating" and proceeded to cause the downfall of our relationship. We didn't talk to each other much because we didn't know how. As friends we had never had deep conversations, so now what were we supposed to do? We basically held hands while watching movies and went to each others' sporting events. One night he mustered the courage to kiss me for the first time, and it was not the wonderful experience I had envisioned. Kissing a good friend, I realized, is like kissing your brother. Gross. Not long after that we ended it, and it took months for our friendship to return to normal. I knew I was over it a few months later when my best friend Lauren started dating him and I didn't care. About five years later, I was a bridesmaid in their wedding!

11. Abel Miller. I fell for Abel the summer before my senior year on our youth group's annual trip to Mexico. He had just graduated. I fell for his sense of humor, his charm, his heart for other people, and he wasn't too shabby looking. I spent the majority of the following school year wishing that we could date, but having to wait until I was officially out of high school. Abel had joined ABC's Jr. high youth group staff. At the time there was rule stating that staff members could not date students. The reason for this rule was to keep pervy twenty-somethings from perusing the selection of teenage girls. Unfortunately for us, the rule went across the board, and it infuriated me that an 18/19 year old guy couldn't date the 17/18 year old girl who had become infatuated with him. We would hang out in big groups, and a couple times even went on "dates" with other couples. (We wouldn't call them dates, since most of the time we left from our youth pastor, Rich's own house.) Finally June came, and the night I graduated, Abel kissed me goodbye before I hurried to jump on the bus for Grad Night. The next night he officially asked me to be his girlfriend. I left for college in Santa Barbara, and we proceeded to make our relationship work for two years. A break or two later, along with living on different continents, brought us to a place where we finally understood that we weren't meant to be together. As painful as it was at the time, after five years courting/dating/waiting/reuniting, I'm so very thankful that we didn't force it to work. I will always be grateful for the time spent with Abel; for what I learned about love from him, and the relationship I had with him. I believe I was better prepared for my next and last love, because of the many hurts and trials of this first serious relationship. My first and only real broken heart was over Abel.

12. Jon Richert. I've chronicled much of Jon's and my relationship. We were best friends for two years before we started dating, and got married a year and half after that. What Jon and I have together is more than anything I ever expected from marriage. In a world that gives up far too easily and a society where "starter" marriages are a growing trend, I am thankful to say that I have an accomplice who won't give up on me when things get difficult. We work together, and enjoy doing so. Sure, there are days when we may not feel very romantic, but at least when the romance is stripped away, we are still each others' favorite person to be around. I've seen Jon grow from a young man who is fiercely loyal and respectful to his mom, to a man who takes pride in taking care of his family, to a man who is just fearless enough to pursue a career that may have at one time seemed impossible. I respect him as a man, a friend, a believer in Christ, a fellow traveler, my husband, a provider, and as the father of our daughter. I can't imagine having the same life I enjoy now with anyone else.