Y Dating

Last night I was reading Rachel's blog about the dilemma of dating at BYU as a freshman, and it just made me giggle a bit. It all sounded so eerily familiar from my own freshman days at BYU. (Only it wasn't so much that I was anti dating guys who were about to go on a mission-- I didn't mind that, since mostly I just wanted to have fun. The freshman guys in my circle were all anti-dating themselves because they were going on missions soon and they didn't want to get "distracted." Whatever. The end result was the same.)

But, fair warning, Rachel. Dating (or the lack thereof) may be a dilemma as a freshman, but it only got trickier for me as a sophomore. I was sharing some of my college dating experiences with Terence last night and decided I just had to share, even if it makes me look like a complete idiot. It was too entertaining to pass up.

At the end of my freshman year I was so homesick that I was super eager to go home. Winter in Utah was not easy for my California blood, and though I had had a lot of fun, it was kind of depressing in the lack of dating department. I had an ex-boyfriend back home whom I had promised to come back to during the summer, and my visions of the Y being a dating mecca having proved to be complete fantasy, I had had nothing on the romantic front to distract me from the past.

My parents, on the other hand, did NOT want me to come home. Perhaps they sensed the danger of me rekindling the past flame, I don't know. (Maybe they just didn't want to have to deal with a still moody 19-year-old, right, Mom?) In any case, they bribed me with the promise of a future car if I would just stay and attend the spring and summer terms of school. I took the bait, and ended up finding myself a room in an apartment complex off-campus.

Turns out that unknowingly I had picked a place where the residents were generally older than me. Nearly every single guy was a return missionary (at least 21) and many of the girls were too (at least 22). And just in case you've never been in a large group of post-mission college kids, let me tell you, they are light years more mature than the college kids who haven't gone. So though I was only a couple of years younger than most of the guys, it felt more like seven. Or maybe ten. (In fact, some guys were getting up there in years and seemed practically middle-aged. I kept wondering if they planned on staying in college for the rest of their lives. . . .)

So here I was, my first summer away from home, and actually getting noticed.

See, part of the dating problem at the Y is that there are just too many girls. Sometimes it is a challenge to get noticed! (Just FYI, I don't think Rachel will have that problem.) But during the summer, the vast majority of the students are gone, leaving a much smaller group of fish in the pond. And I suddenly found that at least a couple of guys had noticed that I existed. One of these guys was named Todd. Todd was 24 and widely acknowledged by the female half of our building as one of the ward "hotties." Just the fact that he actually singled me out of the crowd had me smitten right off the bat.

But remember, Todd was one of those post-mission guys, while I was an extremely immature 19-year-old. Between his maturity and good looks, he made me so incredibly nervous that I couldn't function very well around him. And that tiny little problem led to my number one awkward dating experience at BYU.

I'll fill you in tomorrow.