So this time I will describe my 5th romance attempt aborted before it began: Tori. Things take a bit of a darker turn here, so be warned.
Like me, Tori was a goody-two-shoes at the school. She never cursed, never made any sort of innuendos, never flirted, never wore the little thigh-high white stockings that was basically the only risqué clothing item girls at my school could get away with. I don’t even think she watched R-rated movies or listened to popular music. As a result, most of the other girls at the school didn’t care for her. She was less popular than Melinda, so I decided to try a relationship with her. I considered it a more reasonable alternative to all these Captains of the Volleyball Team.
If I remember right, we really became friends before State Convention began in 199X (my Senior Year), and we both worked with Erin’s mother on the school’s play, so we saw a lot of each other. We hung around together until close to the end of the Semester. To be honest, we really didn’t have a lot of common interests. Quite frankly I can’t remember today much of what we spent our time talking about. But we were together quite a lot, and people began to mutter about us.
Tori had the same problem as I did, though. She found herself developing crushes on the more popular boys at school. I remember being extremely disgruntled by this. I remember getting unreasonably angry when she would – let’s just say it – lust after an athlete in a sharp suit whereas if I tried the same style I might receive a polite “You look nice, caco.” I kept wondering to myself… “The clothes are the same; what’s the difference?” I had utterly no conception of sexual desirability.
Eventually I decided that we had become close enough that I could ask her out on a date. Once again I put the word out among the girls that I was interested. I deserved to fail because I was not being honest with her or myself. Much like her “cute butt” comments at the athletes in sharp suits, my real desires lay in other types of women. Of course, I was completely oblivious to this contradiction. But the word came back around to me, “She considers you too close of a friend to go out with you.” I was still hurt. And it was probably the first time I was truly given the “friend zone” excuse … despite the fact that I named these segments “The Friend Zone.”
Bill says my problem is that I always approached these attempts in a roundabout way. He says if I had directly asked the girls to go out with me I would have met with more success. I don’t think that’s the case with these specific girls, but I think if I had gone insane and just asked everyone I could point-blank, I eventually would have received a positive response. (In fact, there was a girl who crushed on me for most of my high school career, and I never knew about it until a year or two after I had graduated. She’s another true “Friend Zone” entry that I will go into later.)
After yet another rejection, I completely gave up on Tori. Like the shitheel I was, I stopped hanging around her. I took one more stab at developing a relationship, though, a couple of years after I graduated, but only because the girl expressed interest in me first. And that one would be the final nail in the coffin. She was Raye, and I’ll write about her in the next … “Friend Zone.”
Anyway, I found out later that Tori developed another friendship similar to the one she had with me: a rather schlubby guy she spent all her time with. She eventually married his ass, though – because he laid his heart on the line and directly confessed that he was deeply in love with her and that he couldn’t live without her. If I had felt and done the same thing, perhaps I would have had the same result.