I don’t mean to give the impression that I was asked out all the time, but a few guys did look my way over the years. As I aged and boys became men, they were less likely to put up with my push/pull antics and so the cycle was shortened. But I digress…back to Samuel.
So, Samuel was lovely. But I was hot and cold with him. Sometimes I acted like I liked him and wanted to be his girlfriend. Sometimes I acted the opposite. I never felt comfortable or myself when I was alone with Samuel. As a result, I avoided being alone with him, so much so, that I even had a couple of my friends come on a date with us. They chauffeured us around in my 1965 Dodge Coronet convertible, top down, while Samuel and I sat cuddled in the back under a blanket. Bless him…he put up with my shenanigans, my friends on our dates, my pushing him away and pulling him back in, until he was finally over it. He broke up with me after a couple months and proceeded to immediately date one of my closest friends, one of the chauffeurs. I was hurt and jealous. I wanted to want him but did not really want him. I guess I didn’t want anyone else to have him either.
Fast forward to freshman orientation at Wheaton College (yes, the Harvard of Christian schools…but not really). I spotted the cutest boy I had ever seen in my dormitory when everyone was moving in. Not kidding. My mother remembers me literally saying,
“That is the cutest boy I’ve ever seen in my life.”
And then a day or two later, I saw him leaning against one of the massive pillars in front of Edman Chapel. He was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved green rugby polo with horizontal pink and white stripes. Very Benneton. His hair was dark and buzzed, accentuating his perfect features, his large eyes and oh-so-long eyelashes. (Never mind that I was recently re-hashing this memory with my best friend, also a Wheaton alum, and she noted he would not have been wearing a long-sleeve shirt, because it was August in Illinois).
The college, being Christian and all, did not have mixed gender floors and did not allow those of the opposite sex on the floor, except at specific times. To encourage the sexes to get to know each other, each floor had a brother or sister floor.
The Saturday night before classes started, while my roommate and I were peacefully sleeping in our bunk beds, because it was the middle of the night, all hell broke loose. I was jolted awake by full-throttle yelling and screaming and loud banging on our door. A mob was in our hallway. My roommate popped out of bed like a pogo stick and I sat bolt upright in my top bunk. Panic gripped me. I was terrified. What is going on? What should we do? We were whispering…I’m not sure why since the world was ending. She wanted to open our door and see what was happening. I begged her not to open it.
What if it was the rapture? Or heaven forbid, the beginning of the tribulation and we were still here for it?
My roommate would not be persuaded. She had to find out what was happening and assess the situation. She cracked open our door, peaked out, and giggled. What in the world? You’re not going to believe this she said. She opened the door wider and there they were, the boys from our brother floor, running and whooping and hollering up and down our floor, some with bandanas wrapped around their heads and football paint under their eyes. Acting like freaking maniacs.
Once most of the girls had come out of their rooms (some had to be cajoled after all the trauma), we were all ushered into our communal floor rec room. Girls were in pjs, mind you…weird for a college that didn’t want guys and girls on each other’s floors in the daytime. Each of us was handed a carnation and the boys serenaded us with “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling.” I learned that we had experienced our first “raid,” a long-held tradition at Wheaton, where the brother or sister floor invades the off-limits opposite sex floor at random hours of the night and then has a good old-fashioned social. Of course, we would go on to raid our brother floor at least twice that year.
Anyway, that cutest boy ever, that I had first seen in my dorm and later standing in front of Edman Chapel, was at the raid. He was on my brother floor. Oh the fates! This HAD to be ordained. Written in the stars.
This MUST be God’s plan…we would get to know each other, date, maybe even marry.
See, college for most Christian college students is not about hookups, playing the field, or casual dating. It is about finding your mate, your spouse, your soul mate for it is fertile ground for marriage. Where else are you going to find a smart, ambitious, evangelical Christian man with a similar socio-economic background? This is most possibly, no, it IS your one precious and only shot for finding the one. (Yes, we were that sheltered.) The pressure is high. And, to think, in my first week at Wheaton, I had most likely found him.
