Following the break-up, I move on with my life. It was the summer following my senior year, and I spent a good chunk of time cutting off all ties with all my old friends. By the end of my senior year, I hated everything about high school. With just a couple exceptions, I stopped talking to everyone from my high school.

Summer ends, and I begin attending PSU. I like PSU, and I begin to make new friends. For what must have been a little over a year, I enter a dry spell. No romance in my life at all. This was probably partly of my own will, and partly due to not having anyone I like enough to ask out. I experiment briefly with the idea of asking my best friend out, but chicken out at the last minute (for the best).

Around this same time, my friend got me hooked on Internet Chat. Oh God. I had no idea. Chat is like an addiction. Once started, it seems innocent enough, and then you discover that you’re spending two or three hours a day in a chat room in a lab at your school. In my spare minutes between classes, I would log into the chat.

Over time, I made some close chat friends. I even got really close to one girl. We flirted constantly. At some point, we decided that we really liked each other, and proclaimed ourselves to be dating. We were both well aware of the limits of the chat, and the fact that we lived in different states (me in Oregon, her in Kansas), but she was originally from Oregon, and was just going to school in Kansas. We had never met in person, and I had never seen a photo of her (she’d seen some of me on my website).

So while we were both aware that this wasn’t really “dating,” we referred to it as such, and spent a great deal of time sending email to each other and meeting in the Chat. After several months of this, she came home for the summer, and we decided to meet in person (or as we referred to it at the time, IRL (In Real Life)).

Now, for those who’ve never chatted, you can’t really imagine the nervousness that accompanied this event. I’ve been talking to this girl for months. We’ve developed a relationship based not on physical attraction, but on similar mindsets. Our relationship was centered on the fact that we got along with each other. This was new for me. But meeting IRL was a new step. It opened new possibilities. Certainly it brought along the possibility of greater intimacy, and a possible sex life, but it also brought along a rather large worry.

I remember being deeply ashamed of this worry, but having it nonetheless. What if she was ugly? I got along with her wonderfully, but what if I was completely not attracted to her physically? This sounded shallow to me at the time, and it still does, but it remained my big worry.

Finally, we decided to meet at the mall. We did, and much to my relief, she looked fine. It was funny, but the meeting was pretty awkward, even though we both knew each other very well. I think this was because we couldn’t do small-talk because we already knew everything about each other. So we sat in shy awkwardness and ate a meal and agreed to meet again later.

The next meeting was easier, and they continued to get easier. Eventually she took me home to meet her family. Her dad shook my hand and introduced himself firmly, doing everything short of announcing that he had a gun (a fact that I already knew, since she and her sister had been teasing me about meeting their cop dad for some time now). But after the initial firm introduction, I think I got along with her family fairly well. They put up with my presence, and didn’t seem to mind me being around. For the most part, though, we tended to get together in my town (she lived a few hours away).

Eventually, we started a physical relationship. I don’t remember exactly when or how, but after awhile, we were having the best sex I’d ever had. We got along amazingly well, and I think that intimacy helped the sex a lot.

I could say more, but I’m suddenly feeling bashful, so I’ll leave it at this: The sex was wonderful.

I was still living with my parents at this point, and I think they knew we were fooling around, though they may not have known we were having sex. I lived in a room in the basement, mostly out of the traffic pattern, but sometimes my mom would come downstairs to do laundry and catch us under the blanket together. It was never a big deal though, and mom accepted my predictable young excuses with a grin. (“Sure, you were just taking a nap with your shirts off.”)

We went out for a good five months. I guess at some level I knew that eventually she was going to leave to go back to college, but I guess part of me was hoping she would transfer to my school or just drop out (not unreasonable, since she hated her school). She stayed an extra month, and then announced her decision regarding her future, which took me completely by surprise.

She was joining the army.

When I say “completely by surprise,” I need you to understand that I was stunned. I couldn’t have been more stunned. It was as if she had announced her intention to move to Antarctica, or become a man. It was that shocking.

I hate the army. I have never ever seen it as a respectable place with respectable people. My dad was in the National Guard, which seemed to be slightly more laid back, but even so, his Guard stories repelled me. I had a few friends join the army, and I had no respect for them. They seemed to come back physically dumber. Clearly there is a need for people to join the army, but I wanted nothing to do with it.

And I had just assumed she felt the same. We had never discussed the Army. So she carefully explained to me the reasons. The money was good, she would get a complete education as a nurse, and be able to enter the work force immediately after her four years of service, unlike going to college, and they would pay her for doing it, instead of her paying. In the long run, I was forced to conclude, she was right. She would come out with a good education, immediate entry into the job force and a nice savings account, whereas the opposite would happen if she continued in college.

But there was one downfall. We wouldn’t see each other barely at all. If she went back to college, we could visit on breaks and stuff, which already seemed unlikely, but this was unbearable. two months basic training, and then assignment to a military base.

By this point, we had already said I love you. I’m not sure if it was true or not. Certainly, I felt strongly for her. More strongly that I had felt for a woman to this point. Maybe it wasn’t love, but I think if our relationship had continued, we would have grown to love each other.

We discussed the possibility of her getting assigned to Fort Lewis, just a three hour bus ride north into Washington. Over the next few weeks, we still saw each other and made the best of the time we had left.

Then she left for basic. We agreed not to break up, and to get together once she got out of basic (she would have a week or two off before getting assigned). The months passing incredibly slowly.

I was totally fucked, mentally. For the first time in my life, a relationship ending was having a large effect on me. I had mood swings really badly, and swung from angry (at her) to depressed to momentarily happy back to angry. I wrote poetry. bad poetry. I didn’t care. I’d never written poetry before, and had no intention to continue, it was just a way to get the crap out of my head.

It slowly dawned on me that despite what we had said, the relationship was over. I tried to hold some hope, though and waited.

Eventually, basic ended and she came back, but everything was different. I could see it in her eyes. She was a completely different person now, and I was the same guy, maybe in love with her. When she visited, she spent all her time swapping military stories with my dad. We had sex, but it wasn’t as good. We agreed to end it, and she got assigned to a military base in Georgia.

My dad explained to me why basic was such a life-altering experience. He reminded me of how important Outdoor School was to me. I loved Outdoor School because in a brief week, I became very close to complete strangers, who came into our new relationship with no preconceived notions about me. New opinions formed, and trust given freely. It was very liberating to a high school student chaffing under his parents.

Now, my dad said, imagine that same experience times 10. It’s a longer experience at basic, with more people, and stronger emotions because of the shared experience, and the physical element.

She was a completely different person. She called me once or twice from her new base, but only when she was confined to her tent due to illness and was really bored, and then all she had to talk about was the army.

Over time, I slowly moved on with my life, but I still think that if she hadn’t joined the army, our relationship had amazing potential.

::HATELIFE IS YOUR GIRLFRIEND JOINING THE ARMY::