The teasing, name-calling and bullying were very challenging to deal with, but thankfully as people matured, most of that subsided. However, one thing that didn’t seem to change or improve with time was that I couldn’t seem to get girls to like me romantically. I remember in 9th grade, I had just started making some serious friendships with girls. The “girls have cooties” stage was far behind me and I found it thrilling to “hang out” with girls for the first time. During this time, I had a crush on a girl named Heidi. She was outgoing, petite and had beautiful curly hair.
Our school was having a dance and I was dreaming of the prospect of slow-dancing with Heidi. While walking home from school on the day of the dance with Heidi’s best friend Jen, she said she knew something that Heidi had said about me. She said that it was a secret and she wasn’t going to tell me. My heart fluttered as I wondered whether or not she was going to tell me that Heidi had a crush on me. Was this the moment that I would finally get some good news? Was the long night of unrequited love about to come to an end?
I went back and forth with Jen pleading for her to tell me the secret. Finally, Jen relented and told me Heidi’s big secret: “Heidi does NOT want to dance with you tonight. She would feel awkward because you’re short.” OUCH. Rather than being elevated to cloud nine, I was crushed into the ground. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident but seemed to be the story of my adolescence and it made me wonder if I would I ever find love.
Many of the people I interviewed described similar experiences and how it made them just feel like giving up hope. Sun, a Korean, described how she felt about herself due to looking different from her classmates:
I think that I felt really insecure about myself with guys, with feeling not rejected, but feeling unable to enter the social world with dating because I felt like my ethnicity was a barrier that I could not overcome. It feels so hopeless and that insecurity prevented me from really feeling like I could open up to people and have a romantic relationship even be possible.
Sun’s insecurity got in the way of even trying to get into a relationship and it certainly can be tempting to give up hope.
Pleasing the Nameless, Faceless Masses
Another large obstacle in forming romantic relationships is the expectation to conform to society’s standards for what a couple “should” look like, such as the idea that a man should always be taller than a woman and couples should share the same race and ethnicity. There are many other expectations that society puts forth and it can be difficult to break away from these norms and be something different. Conforming to society’s ideals inhibits our ability to form romantic relationships.
We usually do not even know the names of the people we are trying to please by conforming to social norms. One of the overweight men we interviewed, Daniel, described the pressure we often feel to appease the expectations of the masses:
I feel like what we do as individuals in a society, is put too much stock into what the media says. All of the sudden it is People Magazine and the E! channel that is dictating what we should look like, what we should do, and the list goes on. We forfeit the ability to choose for ourselves to make nameless, faceless masses happy.
Attempting to appease the “nameless, faceless masses” can impose some major restrictions on your dating pool if you allow it to do so. The majority of the people you come in contact with may not care. However, if you imagine that they are prejudiced, you may act differently and potentially eliminate the possibility for a romantic relationship yourself. In which case, you are deepening the challenge at hand.
Media Influence on Society Expectations
It seems as though the media plays a strong role in determining societal expectations. For instance, some of the short guys we interviewed described feeling left out of the dating scene due to not meeting the characteristics that women dreamed of while watching Disney movies. Chase described it like this: “I feel like they want to have a big man in shining armor kind of character to be in a relationship with, and I can’t really fit that role, so that’s made things difficult.” Chase felt like he could never measure up to the ideal that many girls dream of.
In a similar way, Riley, talked about not being able to make girls feel like a “princess” because he is short:
You want girls to feel pretty and like the princesses they are. When your presence is prone to make them feel less princess-ish, it’s really frustrating. Also with the thought that you might be more of a princess than the girl, that’s really frustrating too, so I would say the boy/girl interactions is one of the most frustrating things.
Like Chase, Riley also didn’t feel like he fit the knight in shining armor ideal of a tall, dark, and handsome prince, thus limiting his dating options in a major way. When was the last time you saw a short man and a tall woman get together in a movie or on TV? No, rather the media almost exclusively promotes relationships between two people who fit societal norms. It’s OK to break these norms and if you find the right person who doesn’t match the silly rules of society, I encourage you to break them.
You Are the Master of Your Fate
Now, back to my story. After this painful rejection from Heidi, I had a choice to make. I could choose to be reactive, to dwell on both the subtle hints and not so subtle hints, become depressed, and give up; or I could choose to be proactive and take action to feel better. You can’t control what you are given in life; however, you can control how you respond. You can either choose to become bitter or to become better. The poet William Henley once said, “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” Ultimately we are the only ones who control our destiny and control how we choose to respond to any set of circumstances.
I realized that I didn’t have much control over whether girls liked me romantically. All I could do was to constantly work on becoming my best self and do what I could to build and nurture relationships. I knew that these relationships would probably not develop a romantic element to them anytime soon, yet I was determined to not let that slow me down. Rather, I decided to build friendships with a wide variety of girls. In high school, I made a goal that I would make friendships with 50 different girls before graduation. Having this goal motivated me to be proactive and to really reach out, organize group activities, and make several girls feel special. Because I wasn’t singling out the same girls over and over, individual girls didn’t feel worried that I was "after" them and were comfortable accepting my invitation to do activities as friends.
Now, let’s fast forward three years into the future to yearbook signing day and high school is now over. I’m surrounded by friends on the lawn of the high school, many of whom were the girls I asked to join me on group activities. We are reminiscing about the fun memories we made together and relishing in the warmth of our friendship. Although I never did form a romantic relationship with any of them, I indeed felt their love for me on that special day as we hugged and said goodbye to our fond high school memories. Rather than being alone, as I easily could have had I become a bitter recluse, I felt enveloped by love. I had successfully become the master of my fate, and you can too.