Like many other girls, I grew up listening to fairy tales that almost always included some form of romance between two characters, watched the Hallmark channel with my mom where the movie ended with a kiss between the love interest and main character, curating this perfect image of romance in most young girls’ minds. I watched my friends jump into kindergarten marriages and experience awkward middle school relationships and “young love” as they grew up. I decided not to focus on any of that but instead focus on myself. I didn’t know the first thing about how I could love myself, so how could I expect another person to be able to figure it out? Most of my middle and high school years were spent with my friends and parents concerned with my general disinterest in people for romantic purposes, while I tried to focus on myself as a person and who I was exclusively.Â
Now, this past summer, I started dating my boyfriend. We met through my senior year New Visions program and hung out in a small group of mutual friends. I’m definitely guilty of talking about my boyfriend to my friends and sharing stories mixed in with my other day-to-day life stories. Allow me to jump into some of my favorite stories to tell about my boyfriend and me.Â
The Talking Stage
I was incredibly oblivious. The summer after my freshman year of college, my now boyfriend had a bonfire event when everyone got home. I carpooled with my friends and enjoyed staying up late chatting before leaving the next morning. From that point on, we started chatting more frequently, visiting each other when we weren’t working, and hanging out. I did not register the concept of going to baseball games together, shopping at Boot Barn, and buying and building Legos together as closer to dating activities than friends (He drove a solid 45 minutes to my house every weekend to hang out with me, and I was smiling along with the idea that “we’re just friends” and “he doesn’t like me like that”). Eventually, he took a weekend off and went to Buffalo with some of his friends for a concert. I joked about getting cringy concert videos from him. I assumed that he would forget about it, but he did not and texted or snapped me throughout the entire trip (and cringy concert videos). Eventually, we figured it all out and started dating by the end of June.Â
Our Majors
Our majors almost mirror each other in appearance, but in actual classes, they are very different. My boyfriend is a technology education major, and I am an Adolescent Education major with a concentration in English and students with disabilities. It’s nice to be able to bounce ideas off one another, talk about the struggle of figuring out lesson planning classes for the first time, and be able to connect on learning how to be an educator standpoint. However, some of the classes he has to take for being a technology education major blew me away. One of the classes he’s taking currently involves a two hundred fifty multiple choice question test where he will be required to identify plastics (like Polytetrafluoroethylene). This week, he began making wooden cars, a lesson I remember from my tech classes from middle school. This past weekend, he watched me complete an assignment for my Introduction to Special Education class, where I was required to write a sentence with my non-dominant hand by only looking into the mirror. They have this level of connection while also being very different from one another.Â
Oh Boy!
My boyfriend’s name is John Mincher, but because I know basically ten different John’s (my brother, my grandfathers, a few guys from high school, my boyfriend’s best friend, etc.) for the sake of everyone knowing who I’m talking about, his name is Mincher or Minch. He goes to SUNY Oswego for college and is involved in local TV programming available through the school (like SBUTV). Every other Wednesday night at 10:30 p.m., the highlight of my week in the form of a YouTube live comes around. My boyfriend and three of his friends somehow managed to get a show approved. My favorite segment is “Minch on the Street,” where Mincher goes around with a camera and microphone, asking people questions and chatting with friends, doing basically anything that comes to mind. It might be silly, but I thoroughly enjoy being able to watch him have fun with his friends. I also think there’s a level of pure chaos watching boys be boys, in the making mud pies and other concoctions out of the most insane materials and doing insanely dangerous tricks kind of way and not the misogynistic jerk kind of way. The thirty-minute episodes are a quick and perfect dose of show serotonin for me and are luckily in a YouTube playlist (that can be found here).
I’m happy and currently experiencing my first romantic relationship with someone who happens to be very kind, patient, and, in my opinion, a huge teddy bear. He pushes me to be the best I can be while also being able to know me sometimes better than I know myself. I love my boyfriend and am so grateful to be where I am in my life.