Tara Tanico had gotten a boyfriend a week earlier. Dena Kapalushnik had locked down
my original prospect the day before, and so I decided waiting any longer would leave me without anyone to buy a 3×5” teddy bear from the P.T.O V-day sale (complete with one of five Print Shop Deluxe-created card options).
I grabbed my then-best-friend-whose-name-I-now-can’t-remember and told her to go ask Jon Valentine (real name – GOD WINK!) if he wanted to go out with me. “Go out with” meaning go to my basement with lights on and door ajar so my parents could be sure we were actually “playing Scategories.” (Category: types of jobs. Letter: H.)
The way I remember it La Bouche “Be My Lover” came on, everyone screamed and ran to the front of the dance floor, and I decided now was the time to get myself a boyfriend.
Jon said to hhmm…Kristen maybe? “Um, sure” which she reported back to me through a series of howler monkey shrieks and, with that, I had a boyfriend.
My-boyfriend-Jon and I met up in the middle of the dancefloor a few minutes later. I said something like, “thanks…this is weird.” To which he responded, “yeah…I like your one-strap overalls.” And then we slow-danced to Can You Feel The Love Tonight, which would later become “our song” because I vetoed Jon’s nomination of R. Kelly’s I Believe I Can Fly from the SpaceJam soundtrack as The Lion King is so obviously a more appropriate movie by which 12-year- olds should commemorate a relationship. Thank god he’d found me. Well…
The next day I pulled the kind of drama queen over-analyzation freak-out that you always plan to grow out of but somehow consistently forget to from, oh, age 12 to 26 (6 more months!!).
I didn’t want this boyfriend. I didn’t want any boyfriend. I still got queesy watching Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman make out with her native American lover Sully during the 8pm broadcast enjoyed weekly by my
entire family (until things got really “sexy” and Dad wrote to complain to the network).
But I had to save face. I couldn’t dump Jon after one day. Then I’d have no boyfriends and a bad reputation for dumping ones I got after a day, and that’s the kind of popularity suicide that my brand new Hornets Starter jacket (pullover version) couldn’t save (no, I’m not an Hornets fan.…).
So I stayed Jon’s girlfriend. I called his house before 9pm and said, “Hi Mrs. Valentine, this is Jessica, can I speak with Jonathan please.” I wrote him notes and folded them into the likes of god-damned suspension bridges and passed them to him during class. I ordered that soccer game for original Nintendo so we’d have something else to do in my basement on the Saturday
afternoons he’d come over. I sat next to him on the bus and let him come dangerously close to grazing my non-breast-breast
over-top my Starter jacket.
This went on for approximately two years over the course of which I potentially did learn what it was to be in a quasi-legitimate relationship. I have since forgotten, but I’m pretty sure I knew it from late ’97 to early ’99.
I got to thinking about how “it all” began with Jon this past week as between one and seven friends trudged through the drama of figuring out if they were actually in a relationship — one of them 8 months in…
Having a friend ask a boy on the dancefloor of a school gym if he wants to be your boyfriend is by no means “the right way” to get one — but when you hold it up against spending five months in the hook up dance with someone you’re not sure actually likes you enough to even consider being your boyfriend, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea…
I secured my first boyfriend at the Fall 1996 Barkalow Middle School Valentine’s Day Dance.
The way I remember it La Bouche “Be My Lover” came on, everyone screamed and ran to the front of the dance floor, and I decided now was the time to get myself a boyfriend. 
The next day I pulled the kind of drama queen over-analyzation freak-out that you always plan to grow out of but somehow consistently forget to from, oh, age 12 to 26 (6 more months!!). 
So I stayed Jon’s girlfriend. I called his house before 9pm and said, “Hi Mrs. Valentine, this is Jessica, can I speak with Jonathan please.” I wrote him notes and folded them into the likes of god-damned suspension bridges and passed them to him during class. I ordered that soccer game for original Nintendo so we’d have something else to do in my basement on the Saturday afternoons he’d come over. I sat next to him on the bus and let him come dangerously close to grazing my non-breast-breast over-top my Starter jacket.
::pout:: If this is what our dating world is coming to can we all go back to being grade-schoolers?
Love the post! I used to also watch Dr. Quinn every Saturday night with my family and experienced the same EMBARRASSMENT when Sully and Dr. Quinn got a little too physical (I mean, I was only 13!).
I actually wrote the letter because someone (the Mom) made me, but I did resent that they stooped to a cheap ploy of having Sully and Dr. Quinn trying to get pregnant for almost two seasons as a ratings booster. I objected more to that than their embarrassing physicality (playing “Doctor” as it were) – which seemed weird during the otherwise historically puritanical “cowboy” years.
If I could write my first boyfriend narrative, it would be quite similar. Same time of the mid 90s, too. Thanks for taking me back. And for helping me realize that my dating life still sucks (just kidding, I already knew that last part.) Sully was so hot.
i never went through that ‘coz somehow i must have missed the entire dating thing throughout my life. but i think you’re onto something here. it’s far more confusing to be dancing around the question of whether the guy likes you enough to be your boyfriend or not. i gotta find me a friend to ask a boy if he wants to be my boyfriend…
#1 – sully was white, raised by natives
#2 – my thirteen-year-old self LIVED FOR Sully-Dr. Mike makeouts
:o)
You are seriously killing me with this right now.
If I recall, Jon Valentine was as cute as someone with that name should be.
I can’t believe you pulled out Tara Tanico and Dena, but you can’t remember the name of your supposed BFF.
Oh, and I totally had a Jacksonville Jaguars Starter jacket because I liked the teal blue.
I had that exact same Starter jacket.
And I got my first boyfriend, who didn’t go to my school and I had never MET before that night over Bone Thugs N Harmony’s “The Crossroads.” Remember, I was ghetto in 7th grade.
This is definitely the oddest thing that came up when I googled myself.
I’m currently in Barkalow and now it sucks! There is only one dance for the 8th graders. Snooze fest! Anyway I hope you marry Jon. Jk