The Grudge

A came across this post on /r/ForeverAlone: http://np.reddit.com/r/ForeverAlone/comments/2kmxn5/dating_a_girl_that_never_would_have_dated_me_5/

The gist of it is an Indian guy was interested in a girl, but she said she wasn't interested in him, she preferred white guys. Fast forward 5 years, and he has a successful job, and is dating the same girl who said she preferred white guys. He feels jaded about the whole thing since he thinks maybe she only wants him now that he's doing well and she is not, and he doesn't want someone else's "leftovers'.

I know that it's wrong, but I completely sympathise with the guy. Not that it has happened, but I feel like I have done well for myself since leaving high school, and if one of the guys who had turned me down were to ask me out now, assuming I were single, I would have a strong compulsion to say no, just out of spite. Well, and we'd probably be completely different people than our high school selves, so the guy who I had a crush on in high school would probably not interest me now. But even assuming I did fall for him again, the spiteful part of me feels like they have made their bed, and now they have to lie in it. And the spiteful part of me is a very large part of me.

Is it fair to judge someone based on their high school decisions? I did a bunch of cringe-worthy things in high school, and I had a much more arrogant view of myself then than I do now. High school me was in real danger of becoming a weeaboo, but luckily, taking Japanese classes with people who were learning Japanese for non-anime related reasons shook me out of it, and now I have a better appreciation of Japanese culture without the *~~glomp-hug-kawaii-chan~~!*-ness.

Although, I have to say, the kind of person I was attracted to in high school and the kind of person I am attracted to now hasn't changed all that much. My first major crush was a guy with a sarcastic humour who spent most of his time gaming and messing around with computers. But I have noticed that appearance isn't as important to me now as it was in high school - not that I do not find MrMan5.5 physically attractive, but I no longer instantly "fall in love" with someone who is attractive. Conversation has become far more important. I guess because the reality of relationships  hit.

In high school, I didn't know what to expect from a relationship. You like-like someone, and they like you back, and then what? We spent almost 6 hours a day together anyway, and we both would still be living with our parents at that stage, so it wasn't like we'd be going to each others houses and having crazy rabbit sex. I don't know what would have happened if DT had said he felt the same way when I confessed my feelings for him. Now that I think about it, we didn't talk very much during high school, mostly because I was really shy and had that nervous-buterflies-in-my-stomach feeling whenever he was around. I was too afraid to say anything because I didn't want him to think I wasn't cool, and other than hearing him talk about his gaming exploits with his friends (I was the master of eavesdropping back in high school), I had never even played with him once.

Slight detour, I managed to track down his flickr account, and as of quite a few years ago, he seems like the same quirky person that he was in high school. I got stopped at OCAU though, as I don't have an account. Oh well.

Maybe this is the wrong perspective to be approaching this. It's not like he scorned me or anything, when I called him up, I asked him to say he had a girlfriend or was gay in order to spare my feelings (even though I knew it was a lie), and he did, so it's not like he was cruel about it or anything. It's not really his fault that he wasn't attracted to me, you can't really control who you are and aren't interested in.

In some of my more manic moments, I've thought about contacting some of the guys I've been interested in and saying, "Hey, look at me now. I'm really happy and I didn't need you after all!" but in the end, what would it even prove? It'd probably result in a bit of squinting and the question, "Do I know you?" I've managed to do well, and maybe part of it was the push to show that I could amount to something more than being that weird, ugly girl who was too much of a smart-ass goody two-shoes, but going back to the past and being congratulated by my former classmates isn't going to make my life better.

So I think if you can get over the fact that the person has treated you badly in the past, and you are still attracted to them, then why not give them a second chance? People change, and it seems strange to me to cut off someone you enjoy spending time with because of a grudge far, far into the past.