A Strictly Limited Engagement

Final Observations on the Romantic Deficiencies of Middle School Boys

I posted a Note last week, and a follow-on Post, describing the limited capacity of middle school boys for sustaining any kind of romantic attachment. I thought I would share a final observation and lesson learned about this, before abandoning this subject entirely.

When my oldest son Josh was in the sixth grade, near the end of the school year, a young lady in his class caught his attention, and he resolved in his sixth grade heart to make her aware of his burgeoning admiration. The school year was rapidly coming to a close before Josh finally settled on a plan. He determined that he would purchase a single rose in a vase, and present it to her on the last day of school.

And so it was that on the way to school that day, we stopped by the store, into which our champion strode and conquered, returning with a rose in a vase to present to the one he admired above all others.

He presented the rose as planned that day and, by all accounts, the young lady was duly impressed with this romantic gesture. And having learned a thing or two about middle school girls (bless her heart) I strongly suspect my son’s gift raised all kinds of expectations that it never once occurred to him ever to fulfill. For, as it happened, the presentation of the rose represented the sum total of all the attention he ever intended to give to that “relationship”. He had done what he came to do and that, apparently, was that. He was moving on now to whatever the next thing was.

So they parted ways after school that day and Josh never once thought of picking up the phone, over the course of that entire summer, to even acknowledge her continued existence. If she was expecting to hear from him, she was destined to be sorely disappointed. He had made the grand gesture and, in his mind, that was all the attention he intended to muster for such things. He thus spent the rest of that summer shooting baskets, playing in the creek, and eating us out of house and home, without a care in the world concerning any kind of romantic attachments.

As a side note, Josh also had chores to do that summer, which included mowing the lawn. He was prone to allergies, and wasn’t crazy about the job of cutting the grass. He decided one day to innovate his own solution to his allergy problem. We discovered his “solution” one Saturday when we looked out the window at the front yard and there we found Josh, in full view of everyone driving up and down the street, cutting the grass with a large brown paper bag over his head. As I recall, he was also singing at the top of his lungs in order to drown out the sound of the motor, which he disliked. He had, to his credit, cut two holes in the bag for his eyes, so he could see where he was mowing. So there he was, lumbering back and forth, cars containing startled occupants driving by, with Josh periodically stopping to adjust the positioning of the bag in order to continue seeing through the holes.

Let’s just say, at that point in his life, he presented as an unlikely candidate for fulfilling the role of any kind of Romeo.

The young recipient of Josh’s short-lived romantic largess had an older sister who was involved, at that time, in a relationship with a young man about her own age. That relationship was, by all accounts, serious. More serious, apparently, than the father of that family was comfortable with. The father’s objections to the boyfriend boiled over at one point that summer. The older sister was constantly on the phone with the boy who was also continually coming over to their house. The father, in frustration at this state of affairs, finally blurted out, “Why can’t your boyfriend be more like Josh? He never calls.”

“He never calls.” Truer words were never spoken.

Hearing about that father’s remark made me realize that, even though middle school boys fail to meet the expectations of middle school girls, they do measure up to the expectations of the fathers of middle school girls very well indeed. The fathers apparently prefer that, if their daughters simply must be admired, the boys admire them with a kind of lazy indifference and from a very great distance. And that, I am pleased to report, is something that middle school boys excel at doing.