Before I got into game, I failed majorly with girls. But with each failure, I learned powerful lessons that seared themselves into my memory to this day. This is not to say that my learning experience pre-game was nothing but fails, I had small success too. But I believe I learned more from the fails than I did my successes. I intend to share my failures, so that other men can learn from them too.

This is the story of one such fail.

At the end of eighth grade, I switched schools. I went from military school in the U.S. to an international boarding school in England, south of London. I went from an all guys school to a coeducational school. The beginning of the year was interesting as my head was constantly turning to look at all the girls I was not used to seeing or dealing with, outside of school dances.

In November of that year, I went to my second  high school dance. I don’t remember all of it, but what I do remember was that about half way into the dance, I started dancing with this Turkish girl. We’ll call her Turkish Delight, or Delight for short. As I danced with her more and more I decided that she was really cute. We danced and talked until the formal was over, and I walked her out like the little gentleman I was.

I had a good time, and as I lay in my bed, I was enamored.

I started talking to this girl more and more. She would come to my math class during break and we would talk. Her favorite band was Nirvana and she hated Kurt Cobain. In my creative writing class we started covering poetry so I wrote her a poem about Nirvana which she liked. As we started talking more she asked me, “Who do you like?”

I told her to tell me first. She told me she liked some Dutch guy. I gave her a vague description of her “Brown hair, tan, danced with me at the last dance”. She seemed to have no clue who I was talking about and wished me luck. I got her number and contact info (man, that stuff was easy in highschool). One day I learned that she had never had eaten gingerbread before, so I went, got her some (it just so happened a school event offered free gingerbread), and wrote a poem about it! I gave her the ginger during the break in class, but didn’t get her the poem. We went on Christmas break.

I started talking with one her Dutch friends who was in some of my classes, and as we became good friends, confided within her everything. She loved my poems and romanticism and what not, and encourage me to write them and said she would find out if Delight liked me or not.

At this point I had written a small amount of poems about Delight. One poem about the dance we had was even called “Turkish Delight”. I talked about Delight constantly and she was on my mind all the time. I talked with my friends, my parents, and the Dutch girl. At first they were all supportive.

In January I didn’t talk to Delight for a while and I thought it was all over. I wrote sad poems about the end and how I wish I had another chance. Then I started talking to Delight again and I started writing happy poems. I remember I woke up at three in the morning to write a poem about her, inspired from a song by Akon that reminded me of her. In April, she saw a poem I wrote about her because I mentioned I had won some poetry competition and she an awkward thank you. In April, before Spring Break, we had a group presentation due and I took complete control and made a fool of myself (the class was amused but the teacher was not). She got pissed off at me. My Dutch friend told me through text a day later that Delight did not like me. When I went to talk to Delight she told me not to talk to her for a while.

I felt crushed. I talked about her all the time still. My friends tried to lift me up. They told me that they had tried to get me to look at other girls but I only had eyes for Delight. One friend asked Delight if she would ever date and she of course said no.

If you felt sympathetic but tired of hearing my story up until this point, then you felt exactly like my friends. It took until January of the next school year for me to stop talking about this girl.

However, I did learn a lesson from this major fail – I learned not to get too attached to any one girl  too quick.

I mean, I never even kissed this girl. We were never going out. Yet, in my head I was already dating this girl, in love with her, obsessed even. I wrote over 12 poems about this girl and even wrote some vague poems on Facebook about her (I have since deleted the Facebook ones). I got way too attached for no reason at all.

I have kept the poems I typed on my computer as a reminder of what happened so I never make the same mistake again. So far, it’s worked.

Learn from my fail.

~Wald