Romantic or Cynic: My Life Dilemma

It hit me.

I was in the gym, trying to reach my twenty-minute goal on my heart rate monitor, and it hit me: that feeling. That feeling of longing — longing for someone. The longing for someone to want me.

My gym teacher had been playing some music from the 2000s while we all worked out. Some old High School Musical jams, Hannah Montana hits, and even a little Jesse McCartney here and there.

But then I heard it.

It was the song. The song that in 2008 wooed the hearts of tween girls everywhere.

It was the song from the Disney Channel Movie, Camp Rock, “Gotta Find You” — the song that Joe Jonas sang to Demi Lovato by the lake. I swear that song made every girl’s heart ache, including my ten-year-old heart.

When I heard that song for the first time, through the voice of 2008 Joe Jonas, it made me want someone. Someone to tell me — to sing to me — that I was their missing piece, and that they had to find their missing piece — that they had to find me.

In fourth grade, before I even saw the movie Camp Rock, the only thing I knew I truly wanted was a boyfriend. So that song didn’t bring up any newfound desires in me when I heard it. But listening to it then, in gym class of all places, I couldn’t help but want the same thing that I did in fourth grade: someone. I wanted someone.

I went through a rough patch up until the end of sophomore year. I had liked this guy for two years, and I had just never stopped hoping, hoping that someday, I would be his girlfriend. At least, up until he officially got a girlfriend and broke my heart. I had liked him. No, I had been infatuated with him, and even up until this very day (up until the very second that I’m writing this even) I can still say that I have never felt about anyone (ever) the way I have felt about him.

I don’t consider the feelings I used to have for him as healthy, especially when I was at the young age of fifteen/sixteen. I had been obsessed with him. I talked about him constantly (and also talked to him constantly), snapchatted him almost three times a week, and I used to plan strategically where I would hang out on the weekends just so that I could maybe run into him.

I was insane.

I fully admit that, but I still don’t know how I got to that point. I still don’t know how I got to a point where he had become everything, and I wasn’t even dating him (I didn’t even know for sure if he had liked me). Or how I got to a point where he was the only thing that mattered — the only one that mattered.

When I found out — he had gotten a girlfriend — I had cried, but not for long. I had stopped myself. I couldn’t have been crying for more than two minutes, before realizing that I couldn’t do this. I had liked this guy for over two years, and this is how it ends? It ends with me crying on my bed at 10 o’clock at night, and him ending up in the bed with someone else — with another girl? At that moment, I couldn’t help but feeling like I had wasted two years of my life. All of the countless conversations, the twitter stalking, the planning, the snapchatting, all of the times I had hung out with him (which was only two for the record). All of it had come to sh*t. I had wasted my time, my efforts, and my heart. It felt like he had broken me, and through the few tears that I had shed, I realized that’s not how I wanted this to end. I didn’t want him to break me — I didn’t want anyone to break me. I didn’t want to be broken, period.

So I decided right there on my bed, on that early summer’s night, to take a break. To take a break permanently from the guy I had been obsessing over for two years, and to take a break from boys in general.

I decided that I just didn’t want to be that person anymore. I didn’t want someone to be my everything; I wanted to be my everything. I wanted to be all I needed, and all I wanted. And I liked that. I liked not wanting a boyfriend. I liked not worrying about what boys thought of me. I liked not caring about if a boy thought I was cute.

I liked being that person and the idea of being that person.

So I became that person.

But hearing that song in the gym, I felt the old romantic that had been pushed deep down inside of me, flood up. I had felt the romantic side of myself come up, and in the process, just f*** me up.

After the song had ended, I turned to my friend and said something I hadn’t said in a long time, “I would die if someone did that to me.”

“Did what?” She asked puzzled.

“Sing that song to me,” I explained.

She looked at me in slight disgust. “Yeah,” she said. “I would die of embarrassment. I hate when people sing to me.”

I had felt slightly embarrassed, sharing what I had felt, but I couldn’t believe that I had felt that way in general, more or less that I had said it. It had felt like all the walls I had built up over the past two years, were slowly being pried down. I felt the cynic inside of me retreating to safety. And I hated it. I hated that a song could make me want someone. I hated feeling like I needed someone. I hated feeling like my independence had a brief shelf life, and it was almost up.

I hated all of it.

It only took one song to make two years of hard work all come crashing down. I was amazed and not just because a Disney Channel movie song could be so powerful. I was amazed because I had finally felt like I wanted someone after all this time. I loved being single; I thrived on it. Yet there I was, wanting a boy to sing to me a song from a 2008 Disney Channel movie. It was absurd. I hated cheesy, romantic gestures, and singing a song like that to another person is as romantic as you can get.

Maybe I was just lonely, or maybe the old romantic inside of me had been fighting ever since the day I said a “temporary” goodbye to guys and relationships.

All I know is that feeling had scared me, and I hope to God it doesn’t get worse.