Screw Gender Roles And Eighth Grade!
There was a certain incident that took place a year ago which made me reconsider how I’ve thought of gender roles all my life.
I’ve grown up thinking that if a man and a woman feel romantically about each other, the man has to say it first. I don’t know why.
Okay, that’s incorrect. We all know why.
It’s how society says that things should work. But here’s the thing. It wasn’t because I was opposed to women approaching men. I simply knew that my pride could never handle the destructive blow of a rejection, so I wouldn’t take that chance.
Sometimes I envied men who got to make the first move in expressing how they felt about someone they liked. Sometimes I pitied men, who had to make the first move. But it was what it was, until last summer.
Last summer, while scrolling through my social media, one particular post struck me. And when I say struck me, what I mean is it struck me down.
We were classmates in the eighth grade. As an adolescent still learning to overcome the ‘I hate boys’ phase, we had a love-hate relation. But one too many group projects later, I decided that I would like to have my first male friend. So I elected him as candidate supreme, what with him being the only guy I spoke to and all!
Came ninth grade, a few mutual friends, and a few more groups that we got placed in together (because fate?), I began to think that I may have ‘the butterflies’ for him.
Day two of butterflies going strong, I heard his friends tease him with the most popular girl in class. You know the kinds, with streaked hair and the shortest pinafore. I could sense the butterflies ramming into each other in confusion, and their wings getting caught in the frenzy.
The clipping of those wings as each of them fell pained into the bottom of my being was what I perceive to be my first real heartbreak.
I went home and behind closed doors, chided myself for thinking that we could have been something more. I promised myself to only ever admit to feeling romantically for a guy (even to myself), if he told me he felt the same way first.
I didn’t want any more butterflies dying for boys who wouldn’t think twice about me!
I decided to move on. Two days later, we got back to being friends.
Through ninth and tenth grade we grew to become great friends. Although our chemistry was electric and our rapport enviable, I told myself that indeed that is how the best of friendships must be.
In the eleventh grade, I pushed my friend to become a part of something that he didn’t think suited him, a role too foreign for the boy next door.
Making sure that he got the role, entailed us putting in a lot of work. This led to us spending a considerable amount of time together. Amidst strategizing, ideating, and creating, our bickering, teasing, conversations filled my days.
I began to think that after all, maybe two days were not enough to murder feelings. It was perhaps just about enough time to bury them.
The week after he got the role, I saw him walking arms linked with another girl. Butterflies I didn’t realise were still alive wriggled wildly in me, writhing in pain.
How did this happen? I thought we were getting closer, that we had something going on. Did I read all the signs wrong?
I had to walk myself through letting it go once again. He began to date the arms-linked girl, and I did alright and found myself a boyfriend too.
Over the months to come, he would break up with his girlfriend and I, with my boyfriend. He wouldn’t know that I broke up because I realised I was not able to forget him, but it would all happen anyway.
We continued being the best of friends. One day, he said it to me. He told me what I had always wanted to hear. He said that he liked me.
But I was so over wrought with anger, insecurities, and wanting to give him a dose of his own medicine, that I didn’t say it back. That’s what sometimes happens to the brokenhearted, we seek revenge.
We became strangers to each other after that. We moved on with our lives, our loves and our thoughts. We moved from school to graduate school to masters and jobs in different cities.
We got back in touch though. It was a year after our high school graduation, when I did the unthinkable and reached out to him. We began to talk through our friendship. We said it all, everything except how I had felt. I was afraid that if I told him that there was a time I loved him, then I would become ‘one of the others’.
I sought relief in the fact that even if I would never be his woman, he would leave me undefined, which was better than him defining me as one of so many, right?
Four or five years passed through us, because I don’t believe that time passes by us, and we continued being long-lost friends who would unite over a phone call every few months.
We spoke about lost lovers, turbulent relationships, rats that invaded our dorm rooms, and hangovers. I am not sure if he knew how much I cherished those talks. They were sporadic and as random as could be, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
A year ago I sat on one end of the world looking at a screen that showed me something I thought would have been conveyed to me over one of those phone calls.
I saw that he was getting married.
The first guy I had ever loved was getting married.
I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.
But we are still so young. But he just began his master’s program. But the last time we spoke a few months ago, he told me he was considering ending his relationship. But how is he, or his to-be-wife, who were both fresh graduates, going to support their family? Was he forced into this? Is this what he wants? Is he happy? Is he going to regret this?
I couldn’t get myself to wrap my mind around this decision of his. But the most pressing feeling wasn’t that of worry, it was regret.
Let’s admit it already, we are all more or less designed to think of our own selves first, and process how a particular situation affects us rather than the actual person/people it concerns, even situations that seemingly have nothing to do with us.
Amidst all my genuine concerns for him, the feeling and thought that overpowered them all was the following:
I missed my chance.
For the first time, I realised that there was something more fearful than rejection. Something even more fearful than just being one in so many others. It was never getting the chance to express how you felt. And turns out I didn’t even have anyone but myself to blame for it.
Of course, I don’t feel that way for him anymore. I didn’t ever want to be in a relationship with him, let alone contemplate a marriage. I’ve found and lost bigger loves, just as he has.
But I always thought that there would come a day when we would meet and I would tell him how I felt once upon a time. And together, we would have a ten-minute look into our ‘La La Land’.
It would have been bitter-sweet, but I am sure it would mostly have been sweet. Then we would smile, and wish each other the best of our journeys ahead, hoping that someday, maybe even in this lifetime, our paths would cross again.
I thought that the universe would bring this moment to me. I projected this same un-had moment onto every memory of moments we had together. This would be the bridge, coming out form under which there would be light and clarity.
Okay, if you are un-aware of my bridge-light-moment analogy, you must take out a few hours and watch My Best Friend’s Wedding. (As I type these words, even the movie’s title seems to be smirking at my life!)
There is a moment that comes along dressed as an opportunity for you to say all those things you never could till then. I don’t know which my moment was.
I went back in my mind over several conversations and realised that the moment may have been little pauses in between relevant conversations. And like Julia Roberts, I didn’t seize it.
Unlike Julia Roberts, I had no intention of crashing my once best friend’s wedding and pouring out tales of an old love.
Instead, I flooded his inbox with short, stupefied messages of disbelief. He didn’t say much in response, just invited me to go for it (sans any real sentiment, hence with no date, time, or venue — I’ll be there, wherever there is, whenever then is, I guess!).
Needless to say, it shook me and made me think of the things I could do now, lest there be any more words that go unsaid, and moments left un-had.
I finally (and I could hear the chorus of Hallelujahs!) decided to take the plunge and start telling men whom I liked that I liked them.
The first young gentleman I said it to, returned the sentiment and we had a beautiful, loving relationship for seven months. Every time I thought back, I thanked the galaxies for giving me the courage to go out and say what I had to.
There was also another young man whom I thought it imperative to approach. He fell more into the category of what once was. But I wasn’t willing to live with a single regret anymore.
We met over some masala chai to catch up and talk about life. He spoke about his girlfriend for a long while, and I spoke about my boyfriend in brief.
“I won’t find a post from someone on Facebook congratulating you on your engagement someday soon, will I?” I said, half-jokingly.
He laughed, a little.
“Umm.. No? I mean, not anytime soon. I would tell you if something so big is underway,” he said, a little confused. He said is, not was. Hmm….
“It happened to me, you know, recently,” I said, not sure how to steer the topic to where I wanted it to go.
“Oh, that’s.. I mean.. Who?”
Evidently, I was only confusing the poor fellow more.
He bent over a flickering flame to light his cigarette. No eye contact, this was the moment. (Yes, I have no normal sense of what a ‘moment’ must look like.)
“What if I told you that I used to like you?” I said, going right in for the kill.
He choked on the smoke from his freshly lit cancer stick.
“What?” he said, between coughs. “Umm.. I don’t know, like ‘like’ like?”
“Yeah,” I said, and burst into giggles, unable to process the idiocy of the moment.
He began laughing too. We both laughed, a lot.
The conversation went on for an hour. We talked about the when and the how. But we spent the most time on the whys. We got dinner for his girlfriend after, and hugged goodbye thrice.
So if like me, you’ve been waiting for your best friend’s wedding, oh heavens need I say more? Don’t. Go out and say it already, will you!?
Those moments won’t happen under real bridges, whoda thunk. Those bridges need to be created sometimes, and those words need to be said.
Like Rachel and Ross said in one episode of FRIENDS, it’s always nice to know that someone loves you, y’know what I’m saying?
But most importantly, it’s imperative to let someone know when you love them.
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