I annoyed my family a lot as a thirteen-year-old. I was always talking about boys.
“You’re boy crazy,” said my dad. He thought it was funny.
But I was homeschooled, so I didn’t really know any boys. (That was a joke.)
I wrote long, detailed entries in my journal about the boys I know, rating and ranking them, assigning them numbers and symbols and giving them code names. My best friend and I played this game where we wrote down the names of the main boys in our lives and then a set of categories like “cute,” “funny,” “good smile,” and “potential to be a good father.” I’m not kidding, that was a real category. And then we rated the boys in each category on a scale of 1-10. When we ran out of real boys, we made them up.
Rafael was a tall, dark-skinned photographer who loved rollerblading. Patrick was blond and hilarious and liked comic books. There was also James and Swan and Jonathan.
(what? rollerblading is totally cool! source)
I had a crush on a boy for every group activity I participated in. Piano performance class. Hebrew school. Jewish homeschool group. Regular homeschool group. Summer camp. The science lectures at the Franklin Institute. Choir. Acting club.
They weren’t serious crushes. When one boy left the group, I’d promptly switch my attention to his friend, or the guy in the back with the glasses. It was fun to like someone.
But I was homeschooled. So I gave boys up and studied all day in my room. (That was also a joke.)
My mom WISHED that I would study more and think about boys less. I was homeschooled. I could’ve easily been a lot more…unusual. My homeschooled friends weren’t particularly unusual in that respect either, though. We talked about boys constantly. We talked about the books we were writing, too (because all unschooled girls are writing novels), but mostly we talked about boys.
So that wasn’t particularly different or interesting. But thinking back, I realize that the remarkable part was the kind of boys we talked about. They weren’t necessarily the boys other girls liked (though occasionally they were). They weren’t the most outgoing or confident or athletic boys. They were the smart boys. They were the smart, helpless, nerdy, scrawny boys who might later be fashionable hipsters but were at the time about as far from fashionable as it gets. We met them in groups, but they were small groups without very defined hierarchies. We had a vague idea how they might fit into the grand social scheme, but it wasn’t very relevant. What we thought about them was all that really mattered.
(source)
Our parents weren’t impressed. Boys were boys.
We weren’t impressed. We liked who we liked. Boys who were good at computer programming. Boys who were good at piano. Boys who knew a lot about trains. Who knew a lot about anything. Boys who were really good at something. Even if it wasn’t something most of our peers cared about. We didn’t know enough of our peers for that to matter. And in our groups, smart kids ruled.
Later, we dated nerdy boys who were shocked that we liked them, and nerdy boys who had never been on a date before. We dated confident, muscular boys too sometimes, but we thought it was hilarious whenever we did. “Can you believe how typical he looks? I saw these other girls checking him out!”
I thought that everyone in high school was dating, too. But it turned out that it wasn’t ubiquitous. A lot of the serious students I met later on in college and grad school had only been in one relationship, or had never been in a relationship at all. They were focused on other things. They were picky. They hadn’t had time to date, they were busy succeeding.
I always had time to date. That might be why I’m not a lot more successful. In some of my more bitter moments, I yell at old journals, “Did you think about anything else?! Who cares about Tommy?! I don’t even know who that is! And I’m YOU! Do you understand how little this matters now?!”
People think homeschoolers might not socialize enough. We don’t get to go to prom (or do we?). We miss out on a lot of the fun social stuff that regular kids get to do. Or maybe we just do all that stuff with really nerdy boys. It’s not so bad. Nerdy boys are usually extremely nice. They know interesting things. They just take a lot of your time.
The one thing I always thought about homeschooling is that your friends were “picked” for you, in as much as you don’t drive, you are in suburbia, and so your limited to those kids that are in the homeschooling circle. Most of us who went to public school got to whisper about the dangerous boys, the “tramps” to our “ladies”, the ones that were forbidden, dark, moody, tatooed, drunk, messy, and definitely sexy. The ones our mothers warned us about because at our age they were attracted to those “bad” boys as well.
Well, different things are sexy to different people. I never thought
“bad boys” were even slightly hot. I never understood the appeal. And I’m so glad about that, because it spared me a lot of angst and trouble.
It’s true, you might meet a lot less kids who are the same age as you, as a homeschooler (of course, it depends on who you are and what you do and how social you feel). But it’s also true that you end up socializing with a lot of kids who go to school, too, just because most kids go to school, and as a homeschooler, you do more than stay at home.
I have to agree with Kate on this one… as a homeschooled girl I got plenty of dating time in and am very glad for my unshakable geek fetish. I never liked bad boys. I never even liked popular trendy athletic guys. But understand that it wasn’t because we didn’t meet them. We saw them all over the place. I went to community college classes during my highschool years and got hit on by them all the time. We just weren’t interested. We found them boring, typical and lacking in truly attractive qualities. It was something deep and hard-wired. I could not like bad-boys. The second a boy showed some morally ambiguous characteristic my interest waned. I had no time time for boys who couldn’t even manage to pick up a legit hobby by age 15. I liked the smart boys, the good boys, and the boys with unshakable sweetness. You have no idea how much heartache this has saved me.
I have seen so many girls sucked into the allure of boys with pretty faces and no idea how to have a relationship. Meanwhile I had my pick of nerds, whose big thankful eyes would stare longingly into mine – unable to understand how they snagged a cute girl who plays dungeons and dragons, likes to talk philosophy and scifi and is enamored by their ability to reprogram a computer. I became a queen, the lone girl in group after group of smart, sweet and dedicated boys. And now – well – the benefits never ended. I have a keen ability to understand nerdy guys – who by the way turned into gorgeous creatures – having grown into their looks and abilities they are prime targets for the girls who ignored them highschool. smart, determined, well-employed, dedicated to their relationship, honest and kind. They make for amazing partners. But they aren’t looking for just any girl. They want a girl who claps delightedly at their lord of the rings reference and lets them be who they are. There aren’t many of those about. So if you know nerds, you are in good shape. I recently got engaged and my fiance is a total nerd! He’s also a gorgeous grad student working on his phd in philosophy. He is the most dedicated honest and sweet man that I have ever known and he is full of the nerdiest hobbies, habits and interests that I can think of. I LOVE IT!
Homeschooling wasn’t always my favorite thing, but in this respect it served me well. Yay for nerdy guys!
Ha!!! Amazing comment. Queen of the nerds!
I can’t compete with your nerd mastery, but at least I’ve finally watched (and enjoyed) the LOTR movies!
This was really interesting to read because I’ve always been into the nerdy guys too! And the only other person I knew who shares this preference with me is my sister. (We’re both unschooled.) My other friends (who are also mostly unschooled) tend to like the guys that are the more “mainstream” variety of handsome, and even sometimes “bad boys”, and I have never really understood this.
I hope to be raising 2 future nerdy guys for all those homeschooled girls out there! My 6 year old is a nerd (but he was a cool nerd when in PS for prek and K-he was half nerd/half bad boy LOL) I LOVE that my 6 year old will watch grown up documentaries with me (though the 4 year old is not happy about this) I love that he can’t read but we have done more science this school year (Aug10-Jul11)than most kids get their entire elementary school career.
Am I the only homeschooled high school girl who’s also going to college who likes jocks?
Never caught the nerd bug…sports unifroms just turn me on a lot more:D Guess I’m headed for heartbreak haha.
I have to laugh at myself as I read this and feel encouraged as a mother. I always wanted the hobo boy (you know the guy who just got back from treeplanting with two months of facial hair and a guitar on his back spotted writing poems by the pond) but dated the nerds. The thing about the artistic and slightly scarred was that I was afraid we would both hit depression at the same time and then who would take care of us? I ended up with everything. My husband looks like johnny depp (strangers are always telling us that, is a geophysicist, loves the outdoors and is very athletic, reads a lot of books about Arthur and is currently writing a novel that involves elves, and has a very high iq. He is also dark and broody and writes phenomenally aching poetry. He’s pretty amazing!
I love that you had a category for future fathers, I would unschool for that alone. 🙂
Somebody should seriously start a website for us homeschoolers to meet. it would be nice. i was, for the record, a homeschooled graduate, and student for twelve years. i wouldnt trade it for the world. i just wish there was some kind of dating site for homeschoolers