Latest news with #seventhgrade
Washington Post
a day ago
- General
- Washington Post
Carolyn Hax: Parent wants to push lonely tween to work on making new friends
Adapted from an online discussion. Dear Carolyn: My older son (12, seventh grade) is awesome. He's smart, funny, creative and kind. However, he doesn't have any very close friends or a best friend, and he really wants that. There's a group of kids he hangs out with, but he's mostly on the periphery — goes to big group activities but is never invited to smaller activities like sleepovers. He plays sports and is friendly with his teammates, but, again, things haven't really clicked there. I've encouraged him to be more proactive in coordinating weekend activities with the people he likes the most, but I think he's afraid of rejection. I've also encouraged him to sign up for new or different sports/activities to make new/different friends, but I think he wants the kids he likes to like him better. I know I can't make his friends for him, and I don't want to pressure him or make him feel bad about his situation. I don't want to overtalk this because it's really his situation. But I also want to help. I don't want him to feel alone or isolated. — Parent Parent: A lot of kids muscle through entire stretches of grade school socially, for a bunch of reasons: Some are more introverted or cerebral when lunchroom natural selection doesn't favor that; some have interests that just don't align with the in-crowd's; some have diagnosable conditions (autism spectrum, ADHD, etc.) that affect social fluency; some mature ahead of or behind the herd; some have chaos at home and it's all they can do to fake 'normal' between the bells. A few examples, not a comprehensive list. Even for extroverts, it takes some luck to meet 'my people.' Whatever holds a kid back, it tends to improve with maturity, experience and the progression toward full freedom of movement that culminates in adulthood. Your boy has much young-adult exploration and self-sorting opportunity ahead, especially after high school — though high school, too, offers incremental improvement as elective paths open up. Even summer jobs crack the door to self-expression the way geometry class never will. The sigh of relief is almost audible as less-well-adapted kids start to see a bigger pool of potential friends and occupations. Your son is, just by probability, a good candidate to feel this way — plus he's not being bullied, phew, or shunned; he's accepted, he's just not embraced. I don't mean to minimize the very real loneliness of that. But he has people to sit with at lunch, he is involved in productive activities. Coasting a bit as he builds social skills is a valid approach. If nothing else, it means patience is still an option for you. That, in turn, lets you stay out of it and focus on the family side of providing him with a meaningful, fulfilling and connected childhood. He's sharing how he feels, so be there to listen, not fix things for him. Show interest in his interests. Learn to ask him good questions. (Good social modeling for him regardless.) Be the place he feels loved when he's hurt. Have family field-trip plans handy, if he needs to be conveniently out of town sometimes. In general: Watch for signs of serious distress, yes, but also let yourself appreciate the bigger story of the person he's becoming. A reader's thought: · Mom, have you ever asked Tween what he wants to do to fix this? Then be careful that you're really listening and not only hearing what supports the things you see. You're a great mom and already aware of overstepping boundaries, so maybe just make sure you're checking your perspective at the door.
New York Times
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?
The last problem I ever thought I would have was loneliness. From grade school through my late 20s, I had a wide circle of friends, and many of them were guys I'd hang with on a near-daily basis. One of these friends was Rob. We met at a sleepover birthday party when we were 10 or 11. I was nervous about going; the last sleepover party I'd been to featured 'Child's Play 2,' a film about a sociopathic, knife-wielding doll. Within five minutes of watching it, I called my mom and got a ride home, humiliated yet totally relieved. And so, when the boys at the party gathered in the TV room for movie time, long after the pizza and sundaes were downed, I panicked. I remember being ready to call home when Rob announced he'd rather play Nintendo than watch a movie, and walked into the birthday boy's bedroom. I followed him and sat there, watching him play a relaxing, G-rated game featuring wandering elves until the sun came up. I don't remember anything we talked about, but I vividly recall the sense of having been saved by Rob, the feeling that he must have intuited how afraid I was and did this for me. It turned out that Rob — whom I didn't actually befriend until we enrolled as seventh graders at the same big public exam school — was an exceptionally sensitive person. While almost everyone else I knew admired the elite and powerful, Rob always seemed to be scanning the room for an underdog to get behind. He was also genius-level smart and witheringly funny, especially when it came to outing liars and charlatans. He carried a fortune-cookie message in his wallet, which he loved both for its simple, solemn truth and its diabolical double meaning: 'If you promise someone something, keep it.' For years, Rob and I were inseparable, bonding over our love of the then-hapless Boston Celtics, our disdain for posers who engaged in underage drinking, our lust for (and paralyzing fear of) girls. One summer night, after playing hours of basketball in his backyard, we climbed out of his bedroom window and onto his roof, where, under a purple and orange sky, we reflected on the physical perfection of one particular classmate, a girl neither of us would ever have a chance with, and pounded the shingles beneath us in sheer anguish. At some point in high school, an anonymous slam book went around school, and someone wrote, 'Rob Gay and Sam Gay are swinging on each other's nuts like Tarzan.' I hated reading that, but in a way, my idiotic classmates were onto something. I never had sexual feelings for Rob, but there was an intensity to our connection that can only be described as love. I thought about him all the time, and cared, deeply, about what he thought of me. We got jealous and mad at each other, and often argued like a bitter married couple — but eventually, like a successful married couple, we'd always find a way to talk things out. I've been going through emails Rob and I exchanged in our early 20s, and I've been amazed at how seriously we continued to take our friendship. Even in the heat of acrimony, we found the space to not only acknowledge the other's pain and point of view, but to openly affirm our admiration for each other. This was how close I used to be with my male friends. Not just with Rob, but with nearly a dozen other dudes — dudes I spent thousands of accumulated hours with; dudes I shared my most shame-inducing secrets with; dudes I built incredibly intricate, ever-evolving inside jokes with; dudes I loved and needed, and who loved and needed me — and whom, now, I almost never talk to. I know I'm not the only guy with this problem. The notion that men in this country suck at friendship is so widespread that it has become a truism, a punchline. 'Your dad has no friends,' John Mulaney said during an opening monologue on 'Saturday Night Live.' 'If you think your dad has friends, you're wrong. Your mom has friends, and they have husbands. Those are not your dad's friends.' What I didn't know is that American men are getting significantly worse at friendship. A study in 2024 by the Survey Center on American Life found that only 26 percent of men reported having six or more close friends. Polling a similar question in 1990, Gallup had put this figure at 55 percent. The same Survey Center study found that 17 percent of men have zero close friends, more than a fivefold increase since 1990. I know I'm still capable of connecting deeply with friends, but it would be a stretch to say that I'm close to them the way I once was. I hardly ever talk on the phone with my friends, and rarely spend time with them one-on-one. On the rare occasion that I do, it's usually in the context of — or rather, under the pretext of — watching a game. Then, with eyes directed at a screen, we discuss topics: politics, podcasts, food, fitness routines, the game itself. Maybe we'll playfully smack-talk a fellow friend, or commiserate about some schleppy aspect of parenthood. Rarely (as in, never) do we turn to each other and ask: 'How are you doing?' Most men I know say they'd like to hang out more but don't have time. They have little kids or demanding jobs or both, and if they have a second to breathe, they're going to spend it with their partners. One friend says, only somewhat jokingly: 'I have a family now. Why would I want to hang out with friends? What would I get out of it? What are we even going to talk about? It just feels kind of contrived.' Another friend recently transitioned out of a high-stress career. With more free time, he has been trying to see friends more, but, he says: 'There's a stigma around asking another man to hang out. It feels higher stakes for me than it does for my wife.' A buddy of mine whose family recently moved to a new town tells me he has already made several new guy friends, whom he regularly invites along for hikes. I praise him for bucking the trend of middle-aged male friendlessness, and ask him what they talk about on these hikes. 'You know,' he says, 'what's going on in our lives.' I press him: 'Do you talk about personal stuff, like your marriages?' 'No,' he says. 'No talking about wives.' To me, these conversations get at the real reason so many men struggle with friendship. It isn't that we don't have the time — it's that we don't have the energy. There are so many unspoken, byzantine bylaws to male friendship, and there's an ever-present, low-level fear of running afoul of them. For example, I've become less and less willing to tell my friends when I'm sad and suffering, because I don't want them to see me as soft and needy. But I've also become more hesitant to reach out to them, even when I know they are sad and suffering, because I'm afraid of seeming intrusive, or making them feel soft and needy. These anxieties subside when you're constantly around your friends, as I was in high school, college and my early 20s, but when the hangs become sporadic, it's much harder to loosen up. If I haven't seen a friend for a while, even if it's an old friend, there's a clogged quality to our interactions, a vexing sense that we both want to break through but can't. Alongside the fear of emotional honesty, there's the physical discomfort too. I can't remember the last time I held onto a hug with a male friend for more than a millisecond. This lack of intimacy among male friends may feel normal, because it's what we're accustomed to, but it isn't. Until the 20th century, it was not uncommon for men in this country to openly hold hands, sit on each other's laps in public parks and write each other passionate platonic love letters. 'You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting,' Abraham Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed, 'that I will never cease while I know how to do anything.' Herman Melville once wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne that Hawthorne's 'heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours,' and described their friendship as an 'infinite fraternity of feeling.' Today we may see these gestures as homoerotic, but men at the time — gay and straight — talked to one another this way. Part of what changed, says Rhaina Cohen, the author of 'The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center,' is that norms around marriage shifted. For most of human history, marriages were arranged by family, or motivated by economic convenience, not driven by romantic love. Your spouse was the person you built a home with, raised kids with, went out into society with — not necessarily someone you shared your deepest fears, insecurities, desires and dreams with. That's what your friends were for. They were your soul mates. 'There was a norm around sentimentality being a core part of masculinity in the 18th and 19th centuries,' says Cohen. 'In letter-writing manuals at the time, men were encouraged to be expressive about their feelings for their friends.' Think about that: The ability to openly express affection was once a key indicator of masculinity. Nowadays, of course, manhood is measured by the opposite capacity — strong, silent repression. We are far more likely to roast one another than to toast one another. In the buddy comedies I watched growing up, there was sometimes a moment, played for humor and pathos, when the two friends finally shed their masculine armor. But it's just a moment — and often it's immediately undercut by a cheap homophobic gag. Take 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure,' probably my favorite movie when I was a kid. At one point, the time-traveling besties get separated, and Bill comes to believe that Ted has been murdered by a medieval swordsman. As sad, swooning music plays, Bill falls to his knees. 'Bogus,' he says. 'Heinous. Most nontriumphant. Aw, Ted, don't be dead, dude.' But then, improbably (highly improbably), Ted re-emerges from a side door, explaining that he actually escaped before the evil dude arrived. Bill can't believe it — his friend is alive! The worst moment of Bill's life is immediately upended by the best moment of his life. Ecstatic, the friends embrace — Ted even nestles his head in the crook of Bill's neck — but then they quickly pull back. They eye each other suspiciously, and then simultaneously, disgustedly, say: 'Fag.' And then they carry on, happily bantering again, as if nothing happened. What's funny is, of the portrayals of male friendship I grew up on, 'Bill & Ted' is on the enlightened end of the spectrum. It's an otherwise genuinely sweet depiction of two pals who can't get enough of rocking out together, who revel in their shared lingo and idiosyncratic gestures, who aren't mired in the noxiously competitive put-down culture that afflicts many male friendships. Still, that hug scene. I must have watched it a hundred times, and the message I absorbed must have been something along the lines of: If you're a dude, you can get close — but not too close — to your friends. When I asked my friends at what point their friendships began to fall off, almost all of them said the same thing: marriage, kids. Other things happened, too — they moved, they got busier and more ambitious with their work, they got distracted by the internet — and face-to-face hangs and phone calls and long, emotional emails gradually eroded into WhatsApp replies on the fly. But really, one thing happened: Little by little, almost all of them began to prioritize their romantic lives and families over their friendships. It's certainly what happened to me. In my late 20s, I moved in with my longtime girlfriend, whom I married soon after. Being married meant I could no longer go gallivanting around with my boys whenever I wanted to — but by then, I had largely lost the taste for gallivanting around. It was easier to stay in my warm, cozy apartment and watch prestige TV with my wife than brave the cold, filthy subways and blow money at stinky bars. I was becoming more committed to writing and wanted to wake up early, without a hangover, and get to work on a novel. My friends were still important to me, but not that important. My empathic wife (who is an editor at this magazine) was fulfilling pretty much all my emotional needs. Then we had our first child. I had made the decision to be a stay-at-home dad, with the idea that I'd squeeze in my writing early in the morning and after bedtime. This meant that I'd have even less time to see my friends, but I didn't mind. Being a new dad and having vast meadows of time to bond with my son was exhilarating. After a while, though, the repetitiveness of our routines — playground, park, the other playground — began to take a toll on me. I was spending all day in my own head or uttering monosyllables, and I slowly became aware of a strange new feeling: For the first time in my life, I was lonely. My wife suggested that I find some friends at the playground, but almost all the caretakers there were moms and nannies who all seemed to know one another, and I didn't want to be the one weirdo dude in their group. She suggested that I reach out to my old friends for support, but I'd always prided myself on being a fun, high-energy hang, and I didn't want to come off as some whiny downer. Eventually my loneliness started to eat into my confidence as a writer, and this made me even more reluctant to see my friends. How, I wondered, could they possibly relate to my boring creative problems? I thought about going to therapy, but I'd done plenty of that in the past, and I didn't have the time, money or interest to go back. I was seriously struggling, and my writing came to a standstill. I started to see myself as an unemployed washout, living off my wife, contributing squat to the world, increasingly unpresent for my son. These were just the sorts of anxieties I once would have shared with a good friend, but somehow that now seemed impossible. After years of deprioritizing friendship, I felt badly out of practice. And so, instead of picking up the phone and calling someone, I picked up the phone and clicked on podcasts. I listened to so many episodes of so many podcasts, mostly to distract myself, but also looking for a life-changing cure. I listened to Tim Ferriss's conversations with creative gurus like Rick Rubin, hoping to find the hammer to smash through my writer's block. I listened to Dan Harris's meditation podcast, seeking to hack my way to enlightenment. I soon came to see that virtually every podcast in the self-help-o-sphere featured the same rotating cast of two dozen or so guests, but I kept listening. I heard, over and over, about grit from Angela Duckworth and vulnerability from Brené Brown and 'massive breakthroughs' from Tony Robbins (a guy I ruthlessly mocked when I was a stoned teenager but now took quite seriously). Still, no massive breakthrough came. In late 2018, I found something that finally resonated. And I found it on — alas — 'The Joe Rogan Experience.' Let me just say, when you go down any podcast rabbit hole, you are more or less algorithmically guaranteed to end up listening to Joe Rogan. And while many of his ideas made me wince, I found myself spellbound by his voracious curiosity. There was something deeply soothing about his rambling conversations, which often spanned three or four hours. The weave of these yap fests reminded me of what it was like when I had hours of open-ended time with my own friends: the way it would take us a little while to warm up and move beyond banter about biking gear, the way we would inch, steadily upward, to the most elevated terrain — debating the very meaning of life — and then come racing back down to the level of jocular jousting. The more I listened, the more I realized that 'Rogan' was yet another self-help show — specifically, a self-help show for men. The topic that came up, again and again, was how to be happier; and the solutions that came up, again and again, were psychedelics, jujitsu and, above all, working out. What all of these answers had in common was that they were not about leaning on others for support. There was one way out of despair: self-improvement. There was a particular episode that I devoured with rapt fascination. The guest was a man named David Goggins. He was hawking his book 'Can't Hurt Me,' a harrowing saga of being brutally beaten by his father when he was a child, getting called the N-word at his predominantly white high school in small-town Indiana, drowning his sorrows in doughnuts and eventually becoming a depressed 300-pound man. But then, after a particularly bad night at his job killing cockroaches, he comes home, sees a TV show about the Navy SEALs and soon after decides to lose 100 pounds in three months so he can qualify for active service and try out for the SEALs. Not only does he shed the weight in that preposterously tiny window of time, he then survives the SEALs' infamous 'Hell Week,' enduring an unrelenting barrage of excruciating physical trials bordering on torture (and which have led to several actual deaths) despite his injuries and congenital health issues. He becomes a SEAL, and after serving in Iraq, quickly transforms himself into one of the world's premiere ultramarathoners, completing more than 70 endurance races, many of them in excess of 100 miles. Goggins — who, in the wake of that 'Rogan' appearance, became a mega-best-selling author with nearly 13 million Instagram followers — professes to absolutely despise running. And yet he laces up his shoes and hits the road every day, because he hates it. This is his message: Deliberately suffer. Do something you hate to do, every single day, no matter what. If you feel like a victim, victimize your own body. Callous the mind, keep going and stay hard. Listening to him was a revelation: He was raw and rude and self-lacerating, the antithesis of everything I'd been hearing from Brené Brown. He talked, without shame — with pride, even — about having no social life, about grinding alone on empty roads, about sitting in front of his TV each night and stretching for hours. His message was so grim and, somehow, so hopeful at the same time. He struck me as a kind of existential hero, someone who had embraced the absurd fate of being a lonely, emotionally caged man in America. And at that point in my life, it was exactly what I needed to hear. I was out of shape and pouchy, having relied on IPAs and ice cream for years. But as soon as my wife arrived home that night, I went for a run around the park. It sucked, but according to Goggins, that meant I was doing something right. I ran the next day, and the day after that, and soon started lifting weights, too. Eventually I joined my local CrossFit gym. I was determined to follow the letter of Goggins's law — to work out every single day, especially when I didn't feel like it — and I did. At one point, after a long bike ride, I got a staph infection. I had to stay in the hospital for two nights, and I still managed to do squats, lunges and other calisthenics with an IV dripping lifesaving Bactrim into my veins. I was fully aware that my behavior was extreme — and increasingly annoying to my wife — but I had no intention of stopping. After feeling stuck and ineffectual for so long, I was invigorated to see that I had near-total dominion over my body. Learning that I had these untapped stores of resilience — knowing, deep in my leg bones, that I really could keep going, no matter what — gave me a kind of swagger I had never known before. I took selfies in the mirror and saw hard-won muscles, and while I knew intellectually that none of this made me a man, I kind of felt like one, finally. I ended up working out for over 1,000 straight days. My streak, of course, did nothing to cure my loneliness. Despite all of my self-reliant triumphs, I remained largely unhappy. I missed my friends terribly, and found myself getting emotional while watching movies about friendship that were not intended to be tear-jerkers, like 'Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.' Simply seeing other dudes having fun together — like the scene in the prematurely canceled TV classic 'Freaks and Geeks' when the dorky boyhood pals ecstatically blast off model rockets — moved me deeply. And I completely lost it watching 'Breaking Point,' an episode of the Netflix series 'Untold' about the relationship between the brash and bro-ey tennis superstar Andy Roddick and his best friend, Mardy Fish, who has a career-shattering anxiety attack right before he's set to play Roger Federer at the U.S. Open. As Fish retreats into a nearly catatonic state of shame and isolation, the surprisingly softhearted Roddick calls him again and again to check in and chat. Eventually, Roddick makes a proposal: If Fish will agree to pick up his racket, Roddick will come out of retirement, too, and they can be doubles partners. Fish takes him up on the offer, and the two old friends enter a tournament. They don't make it beyond the second round, but they have the time of their lives. Soon after, Fish publicly discusses his mental-health challenges, something that was virtually unheard-of for athletes at the time. It wasn't as if 'Breaking Point' (which my brother was a producer on) sparked some epiphany. I knew all along that Fish and Roddick were the kinds of guys I wanted to emulate. The problem was, I also knew that in some ways what they did was more difficult than anything even Goggins had achieved. And this is what stumped me: I was hard enough to work out for 1,000 straight days, but I still wasn't hard enough to call my friends. Eventually I discovered a different kind of podcast. It's called 'Man of the Year,' and it's hosted by the comedy writers Aaron Karo and Matt Ritter, best friends who met as second graders in Long Island. Karo and Ritter eschew talk about burpees and ketamine, and instead are laser-focused on improving men's 'social fitness.' And while the advice they give can sometimes seem obvious — that's the point. There's a Zen crispness to their formulations, like: 'Be the friend.' Don't wait around for someone else to call you — and don't assume that the friend you want to call doesn't want to hear from you, because they probably do want to hear from you and are just as mentally blocked as you are. When I called Karo and Ritter and told them that I had many friends but was still somehow lonely, they told me this is one of the most common complaints they get from listeners. Men, says Ritter, 'wake up at 30 or 40 and say, 'I have no friends.' They actually have a lifetime of friendships. But really, the issue is that they haven't put in the effort they've needed to. Guys forget that friendship is a relationship — it requires watering.' Among the watering techniques they suggest: 'TCS,' which stands for 'text weekly, call monthly, see quarterly.' 'The great hack about having a regular event,' Karo says, 'is you don't have to worry about calling — it happens automatically.' Over the past year, I've tried to put Ritter and Karo's tips into practice. I'm not coming close to hitting their TCS quotas, but I'm calling old friends like Rob more frequently than I used to, and I've been making the effort to see friends in person more too. Recently I got together with a college buddy in Manhattan. We'd had a yearslong running 'we should meet up' text thread that never led to anything, and then he invited me to see a concert at one of those Greenwich Village dives I used to frequent in my early 20s. I was resistant to going. It was a long train ride on a bitter-cold night, and I worried that going to see some washed-up folk rocker would make me feel old and lame. But I forced myself to go. Nothing extraordinary happened that night. We met up for burgers, followed them up with enormous ice cream cones, went to the show and sang along to the cheesy, wonderful lyrics that had blown our college-aged minds. Throughout the night, I caught him up on some of the struggles I'd had over the past decade, and he lent a sympathetic and encouraging ear. Buoyed by his kindness and curiosity, I asked him about his family too. And for the first time, I asked him about the intricacies of his job in finance, which turned out to be much more interesting than I imagined. On my way home, I called my wife and ecstatically told her what a great time I had. When she asked me what, specifically, was so amazing about the night, I couldn't really explain it. Nothing in particular stood out. We didn't have some kind of transcendent conversation, but we had no problem talking honestly. We didn't empty our souls, the way my wife and her friends might do with one another. That was OK; we related on our own terms. I felt free and easy the whole night, afloat in the presence of an old friend's unjudgmental love. I watched the city whir by in ribbons of red and white light, and I knew I was on the precipice of something. I could do this again. I wasn't cursed to some joyless Sisyphean slog. I didn't have to crush life. I was allowed to enjoy it — had been all along. It was like some big, impenetrable door had swung open, and on the other side my friends were there, waiting.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
I Finally Got To Date My Crush Years After Middle School. Then The Unthinkable Happened.
The author at her 13th birthday party. Everyone remembers their first big crush. Mine was Jeremy, a name I had written hundreds of times on my seventh grade binders in big loopy hearts. He'd held the starring role in dozens of notes I passed in class and the daydreams that got me through fourth period science with Mrs. Banks. Jeremy ― the immortal 9th grader, vice president of student council, tennis player and wrestler with the dreamiest green eyes. He appeared each morning on our school's television announcements with a smile straight out of Teen Beat. Every morning, when those school announcements came on, I watched that boxy television set like Peter Jennings himself was delivering the news. Since we weren't in any classes together, I intentionally moved my locker within feet of his, just to be in his orbit every day. Seventh grade was a traumatic year. My parents were in the thick of a messy divorce. My mom underwent surgery and then radiation to remove a tumor from behind her eye. My sister, my only sibling, went off to college. And my childhood home went on the market (and was later sold, coincidentally by Jeremy's mom, a real estate agent). But even as my world erupted around me, seventh grade was magical, because of him. He was kind, if not patient. I wrote him a lot of notes, and from time to time, he wrote me back. When my friends cornered him in the school cafeteria during a Halloween dance — at my instruction — and pushed him in my direction so he could slow dance with me, he obliged. My friends and I also conspired about how we could bring him on a triple date to see the Steven Spielberg movie Always, and he joined us, a group of 12-year-olds, without much prodding. I spent the next two hours and three minutes with my arm brushing up against his, watching him out of the corner of my eye. At the end of the year, he wrote 'Love ya' in my yearbook, told me I was 'sweet and cute' and asked me to KIT (keep in touch) next to his number scrawled on the page. I was gawky with a perm-gone-bad and a mouthful of braces, and when I read those words, it was the pre-teen equivalent of a marriage proposal. Some called it 'puppy love.' But even at the time, I felt as though that cheapened it, made it seem inconsequential. He was magnetic, and I was drawn to him like nothing else in my life. We loosely kept in touch as the years passed, enough to keep track of one another as he went on to high school, and I moved an hour north. We traded AOL instant messages around the time he graduated from college and then law school, and I became a general assignment reporter outside of Philadelphia. After he began to practice real estate law, I told him about my hope to become an author one day, and he humored me. From time to time, when I was back in Miami, I would swing by his place and hang out on his couch. Throughout those years, even when we weren't actively talking and as I dated other people, he actively lived in my mind. I thought about him so often he made repeat appearances in my dreams. It was clear, even then, he owned a piece of me, no matter what else happened in my life. But as our lives continued to move at a dizzying pace and became more complex, we drifted almost completely out of touch, and a few years went by without us speaking. Then, more than 28 years after we'd met, the tables had turned, and he was watching me on TV. He saw me on CNN, where I appeared as a political analyst, and decided to send me a message on Facebook. The 12-year-old in me was giddy. Related: 19 Wholesome Posts I Saw This Week That Were So Cute, They Legitimately Put Me In A Happier Mood The message Jeremy wrote in the author's seventh grade yearbook. Related: A Woman Went Viral For Not Tipping On A $350 Hair Service, So We Asked Hairstylists To Weigh In What followed was an avalanche of text messages, not just that evening but in the days and weeks that followed — from morning until we fell asleep every night. For the first time since I'd known him, his flaws began to come into view. He told me about a dark time in his life a couple of years earlier and how stress had led to a drug addiction and then time in rehab. And while he had been in recovery for a while, he continued to cling tightly to near-daily Narcotics Anonymous meetings for support. I told him about my two-and-a-half-year-old son and my struggles as a single mom, trying to juggle it all, always wondering if I was failing as a parent. He liked books and politics, and lucky for me, I had just co-written a political book on the 2016 election. We often swapped songs throughout the day, as if we were making each other mixtapes. They were mostly cheesy tunes from the '80s when we were kids. In no time, our texts moved to phone calls and then, just a few weeks later, he boarded a plane to join me in Washington after I was invited to a White House holiday party for journalists. It was our first official date. The party was accompanied by a weekend of dinners, a long walk along the Lincoln Memorial, and even a quick jaunt to New York. We held hands. We kissed for the first time. We shared a bed. Before he returned to Florida that weekend, he agreed to join me in California for a week-long trip a month later. I was speaking at a book festival there, and he watched from the front row. And after that, we were reunited again and again just about every couple of weeks. I was finally his girlfriend. We talked about moving in together and getting married. He joined my extended family for a Passover seder. Then a few days later, I had dinner with his parents, his brother, and his sister-in-law at their neighborhood country club. It was full speed ahead... until it wasn't. Sitting at a hotel bar in Washington, Jeremy told me he was scared of commitment, and he worried he would end up hurting me ― if not now, maybe years down the line. He also wondered whether he would be able to leave his life in Florida and stand on his own without the support from his NA group back home. At the same time, he wasn't sure if he was good enough for me. It turned out he had his own insecurities about whether he could match up to me, a reversal of sorts from our time in middle school, when I came one degree short of stalking him. Life sometimes, I realized, has a way of changing trajectories. 'I'm not going to chase you around like a puppy dog,' he said. To make matters worse, he had also been seeing someone on the side, someone so different from me that it made me question what he ever saw in me in the first place. We never really said it aloud, but we were breaking up. 'I wouldn't worry about it,' he told me that Sunday afternoon before catching a flight back to Florida. 'It will all work out.' I begged him to change his mind in a dramatic scene at the Newark International Airport after he set his baggage on a conveyor belt. 'Don't go,' I said. 'Stay here. Stay with me.' I watched him in the security line, moving slowly toward the front, until he was out of sight. It crushed me. I doubted myself in every way after that. All my insecurities ― every one I've had since I was that 12-year-old standing by his locker ― surfaced in ugly ways. How could he walk away from what we had after nearly 30 years? Did he not love me after all? Was this all in my head? I read a book called How To Fix A Broken Heart and then found the man who wrote it and met him for therapy sessions. I also hired a love coach who emailed me tips on ways to get Jeremy back. Still, she cautioned, 'The onus is on him. You have to be willing to walk away if he doesn't meet your standards.' So, in the painful months that followed, I pushed myself forward because I knew as much as I loved him, as much as our decades-long story was more captivating than if we had met last week on Bumble, it wasn't enough. After we broke up, he sent me roses and vinyl records and even a strange paperweight of a distorted face. He told me he missed me and hinted that maybe one day we'd be back together again if he could work through his problems and fears. I wanted so badly to believe him. It took several years until the sharpness of the breakup had finally dulled. Around the same time, he relocated to Atlanta looking for change. We texted each other from time to time, and he would call me randomly. 'I wanted to hear your voice,' he'd often say. During the pandemic, after we were both vaccinated, he asked if he could come visit me. I changed the subject, like jerking a steering wheel to avoid an accident. I still adored him. I still thought about him every single day. But I had built a wall by then, desperately afraid of getting hurt again, unwilling to plunge so deep into the water that it would take me months, even years, to recover. Still, somewhere in the heart where we dead-bolt our secrets, I thought maybe someday there might still be a future for us if he would just let himself love me. In the fall of 2021, I noted that a month had passed since we texted and promised to catch up on the phone. I was sitting on the couch beside my mom one evening when my phone buzzed and a Facebook message flashed on the screen. I didn't recognize the name, but I opened it up. A woman introduced herself as a longtime friend of Jeremy's, who had spent time with him in recent months in Atlanta. 'I'm so sorry if I am the first one to share the news,' she wrote. 'He would want you to know, and I think you deserve to know that the time he spent with you was very meaningful to him. He always spoke highly of you and thought you were brilliant and kind.' She attached a short memorial from a funeral home. 'He loved you,' she wrote in a second message, a few minutes later. 'He made bad choices. And he regretted not choosing to be with you. Just wanted you to know.' I learned he wasn't able to find his footing in Atlanta. He turned to drugs again to mask the loneliness of the pandemic, of a new town. The author, age 13, with "The Game of Life" board game that Jeremy gave her. To say it wrecked me would be an understatement. I wasn't his wife, or even his girlfriend anymore, but the searing pain of it all was like nothing I've ever experienced. I was mourning our adult relationship, of course, which had come so close to blooming. But I was also grieving the passing of our youth. I kept coming back to the time — a week before we ended our relationship — when he and I drove together through the Miami neighborhood where we'd grown up. We parked outside his old house, where I'd made my friends walk dozens of times decades earlier, hoping to 'bump into' him. Then we drove a few blocks to my childhood home, where he once showed up for my 13th birthday party carting the board game LIFE. We didn't know it at the time but it was as if the universe was granting us one last tour of our adolescence. Grieving his death was like breaking up with him all over again, except this time there was no way of trying to salvage the relationship. No advice on how to win him back. The hope, the promise, that it would all work out, as he declared in our final moments together, was gone for good. That's the part that still jolts me awake at night. A few months after we ended our relationship, he sent me an email once again expressing that hope we had both clutched . 'I just have to say one thing,' he wrote. 'Despite where we are right now, and how bad things have been between us, I have a strange feeling that the glass we share is half full...' I often think about what could have been, how he was the missing piece I had craved for nearly all my life. But there are times I also wonder if he intentionally tried to spare me from additional heartache, unselfishly, knowingly, cutting me loose because he did love me. Jeremy taught me that love isn't perfect. Sometimes, it's messy and hurtful, and it doesn't always end the way you want it to. But it's a love story all the same. Amie Parnes is a senior correspondent for The Hill in Washington, where she covers the Biden White House and national politics. She is also the author of 'Lucky,' the #1 New York Times best seller 'Shattered,' and 'HRC State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton,' which was also a New York Times bestseller. She was previously a staff writer at Politico, where she covered the Senate, the 2008 presidential campaign and the Obama White House. This article originally appeared on HuffPost in January 2024. Also in Goodful: Men Are Sharing Things They Wish More Women Had Sympathy For, And I'm Already Laughing At How Women Will Respond To Some Of These Also in Goodful: I Believed I Was Destined To Be A Nun. But When I Moved Into A Convent, Things Changed. Also in Goodful: 19 Wholesome Posts I Found On The Internet This Week That Are So Urgently Needed Right Now
