Remember when young love was stupid?

Tonight while I was going through an old journal , a note fell out of it. It was written on hotel stationary and was not in my handwriting. It was a love note from an ex that said “K has found a spacious room in T’s heart”. This took me way back to the 80’s when I was a student at BYU Hawaii – not every student is Mormon! T was my first real love or so I thought. We both worked at the student activities desk and our job was to answer student’s social questions, basically socialize. He was from Kiribati and therefore, different and exciting to me.

He was attracted to me because I wasn’t Mormon, I was fun and dangerous ‘cause I was one of the girls who drank and wasn’t a virgin. Our relationship started out purely sexual and developed in to something more serious. We had 9 months of making love every night at the beach under the stars, and attending school functions where we got off on trying not to get caught making out in the bathroom.

Things got serious fast when he asked me to marry him and me being foolish and young, said yes. I remember my father saying “What does this boy have to offer you?! He’s not even from this country and has nothing!”. He was right but wasn't that really part of my attraction to him? Did I really think he could marry me since I wasn’t Mormon? The demise of our relationship came as a complete surprise to me when I found a receipt for wedding bands in his wallet and it wasn’t my name being engraved on one of them.

There was so much drama and emotion involved in that breakup and it was not a simple cut and dry. I can now admit it took me a full two years to get over that love. I could no longer listen to Gloria Estefan because we always listened to her when we had sex. I finally took him off my speed dial at work, stopped checking his horoscope in the paper, and stopped wondering how and if the marriage even worked out. She was Mormon.

That relationship really set the tone for all future relationships and for the longest time the biggest lesson I took from T was “screw them before you get screwed”. I’m not proud of that lesson and it eventually ruined most of my future relationships. What a shocker. But the end of that relationship was also the beginning of my second one, with one of his best friends. If it sounds like it was developed out of pure spite, you’d be right about that. But the story of Rebound guy is for another post at a later date when the meaning of “Revenge is a dish best served cold” never rang truer.

K