My first boyfriend

I was in year 6 at school (about 10/11 years old) when I had my first real boyfriend. I am not saying that I didn’t play ‘kiss chase’, ‘50/50 in’, ‘bulldog’ or ‘stuck in the mud’ (90’s playground games) with boys before that, because I did (who doesn’t loved to be chased in a non stalker/murder way).

I was picky and wanted to make sure my first boyfriend was ‘the one’, from all the American TV shows that were shown in the UK on a Saturday morning, this was standard practice and I wanted to be just like the kids in America.

His name was Dan, he loved football and was the popular boy in my year group, the standard requirements for a Junior school boyfriend. I started communicating with him by placing love notes in his tray (no this isn’t rude… We didn’t have mobiles/email back then, so had to communicate with handwritten notes, the trays are where school children would keep their work books). This went on for a while until he sent the note I was waiting for. The checkbox note; the note where he asks if I would go out with him and I would have to tick, yes, no or maybe. A little something like this:

We went out for a good number of months, we would go to each others houses, hold hands in the playground, go to the cinema and the furthest we ever got was kissing on the lips, more of a peck (not like children now who seem to of lost all innocence).

We broke up before the summer holidays, our friendship groups would be running between us while we sat separately on the field waiting to hear the news of what the other one said, our friends who held the precious information, of course had a bad case of unable to relay the correct message (Chinese whispers), by the end of the lunch break Dan and I were no more.

My heart was broken, my life was ruined, all of our plans for the summer; going to the cinema (again) ‘hanging out’ in the town centre/parks was over just like that. We had made plans for all of our five years together at senior school and it was now gone. I never thought I would be able to move on from Dan, I begged my parents to change the senior school that they had planned for me, as I knew my heart would break each time I saw him, they of course declined. I had to prepare myself for the worst…

On the plus side I had a pretty good summer, on the negative side Dan and I never spoke again, even though we attended the same senior school and had a few classes together, no two words past between us. I am not sure if we were both too stubborn to talk to each other, or if the pain and heart ache was just too much. I am going to go with the first option.