Life lessons learned from Shakespeare

Reminiscing about the past yesterday made me realize something.  Something I think I've known for a while.  How long a while?  Well...let me think back to the first time I heard the story of Much Ado About Nothing.

For those out there who are completely crazy and aren't Shakespeare fans (this play is seriously hilarious), let me tell you just a little bit about the side story of Benedick and Beatrice.  These two characters hate each other, no, they despise each other.  They are constantly bickering and insulting each other in front of everyone in the town, and each of them promises that they will never fall in love and get married.

Well, one day, their mutual friends decide to set them up with one another.  They do this by creating a scene where Benedick overhears a few of his friends discussing how much Beatrice is in love with Benedick, but that she would never say anything.  He is at first flabbergasted, and then in the course of 10 minutes goes through the stages of "of course she is in love with me" to "I guess she is okay" to "she is actually pretty great" to "I LOVE HER!!"  The same thing is done to Beatrice, who overhears some of her friends talking about how much Benedick loves her.  She goes through the same stages, and pretty soon, they both are madly in love with the person who they used to despise most in the world.

ANYWAY, the take-away point here is that you can fall in love with anyone, if they like you first.  And ever since I was a young elementary school child watching a superb rendition of Much Ado About Nothing in my grandmother's living room, I think I realized this point.

I didn't, however, realize it personally until it started happening to me.  Yes, sadly, this has happened to me.  Well, I didn't fall in love, but I did fall in like.

I am taken back to my freshmen year in high school, when I was just a young, impressionable wisp of a girl.  I was in geometry with some other freshman friends, and also a few sophomores who weren't smart enough to take it earlier.  One of said sophomores was a...well, the best way to describe him was, well, a shrimp.  He was so tiny that he was a few inches shorter than me, and I'm not a super tall girl--especially when I was 15 years old.  But he was a wrestler, so I guess his tiny size was good because it got him in a smaller weight class where he could wrestle other punies.   

Anyway, said shrimp decided that he had a crush on me, and that I should like him back.  He told several people in the class, intending, I think, for the information to make its way back to me.  It did.  When I first heard the news, I think I had a blank stare on my face somewhat akin to a look of "Him?  Oh, dang, why?"

But as time went on, and the shrimp kept coming onto me, I slowly began to look at him differently.  I mean, he didn't grow any taller, and his face didn't get any better looking, but I actually began to...kind of...like him.  Weird!  Even as it was happening to me, I wondered what the heck was going on.

I'll tell you what was going on...I was flattered.  I was flattered that someone noticed that I existed, and that he found me somewhat attractive, and that he spent time thinking and talking about me.  I was flattered that he was popular, and I was not, and he still liked me.  I began to ignore all of the unattractive things about him, and somewhere in my mind make up good qualities in him.  He would flirt with me in class by looking over at me, and then give me an uneven smile.  I think my cheeks probably turned red.  I "liked" him so much that I think I even went to watch one of his wrestling matches.

Even while this was going on, however, in the back of my head I was semi-disgusted with myself.  What in the world was I doing?  Why would I start liking this guy, just because he liked me first?

Well, it continued for a few weeks, until one day the shrimp ran to catch up with me as I was walking out of geometry class.  He came up to my side, and slyly reached out and took my hand in his.  My eyes got huge and I looked straight ahead as rushed thoughts raced through my mind, "Ahhh!  He is touching my hand.  Do I like that he is touching my hand?  No!  But if I like him, shouldn't I like that he is touching my hand?  Yuck, this is really weird.  Nope, don't like it.  Don't like him."

After that moment, all pretense of me liking him was gone.  I still acted nice and friendly to the guy, but there was no flirting involved.  I was done.  Soon after he realized that I wasn't going to fall for anything else, he lost interest in me.  I probably should have been sad.  I lost my chance at getting further attention from a sophomore.  I lost my potential ability to be popular and high-school famous.  I probably ruined my whole high school career in the course of one awful relationship.  Actually, I probably ruined my whole life.

But I was totally okay with that.  I guess you could say it made me who I am today:

 

Hmm.  Let's pretend that that's a good thing.