Object of My Affection

When I was 16 years old, I spent a passionate few months as someone’s very serious secret admirer. The unwitting recipient of my devotion was a boy I really didn’t know at all, but Cupid’s arrow had struck somewhat indiscriminately the previous spring during a rehearsal for my school’s production of “South Pacific.” On that particular enchanted evening, the young actor playing Emil came to practice singing along with the orchestra, where I was playing the flute. 

Before describing his entrance, I should note that I went to an all-girls school and spent 90% of my waking hours in the presence of girls and women, with the exception of my dad, a couple male teachers, and maybe the attendant at the Chevron station who washed the windows of our station wagon – back in a more chivalrous time when things like that still happened. I had never been on a date or even come close to a first kiss. Being in the musical was one of the only ways to meet boys, who were imported from our brother school across the river, but I was already way too familiar with the ones who played in the orchestra. They were nice, but not romance material. Which is all to say that every encounter with a new male specimen had, at that time in my life, the rarity of a UFO sighting and pulsed with extreme significance. So when our amateur Emil walked in the room, looking like Tom Cruise’s younger brother, to sing a few timeless romantic tunes, I was slain. 

This being the spring of 1994, the only way to gather intelligence on my probable future husband was the old-fashioned way: by asking around. I giggled all about it to my friends the next morning, knowing zero details about this person other than that his name was Rob (name changed to protect the innocent) and he was very handsome and he was a tenor. Before long, our OG social network unearthed a classmate who had shelled out twenty bucks to buy a copy of the brother school’s student directory, which revealed some vital statistics: his last name, his hometown, his birthday, his dorm. I borrowed the directory for an afternoon and made an enlarged, extremely grainy photocopy of his black-and-white school photo, which I promptly pasted into my journal. A few weeks later a friend of a friend whose older sister had been in a play with Rob produced an actual photo of him wearing a t-shirt and sharing a laugh with someone just out of the frame, showing off his somewhat muscular frame and, in my opinion, perfect profile. This was also memorialized in the journal surrounded by a platoon of hearts.

I had a full-blown crush on Rob for the rest of the school year without ever speaking to him. During the dress rehearsals and performances of the musical, I gazed up from the orchestra pit during his scenes, trying my best to swoon and hit all my notes at the same time. I inwardly cursed the senior playing Nellie who got to kiss him onstage, then doubly cursed her when I heard rumors that Rob had real-life unrequited affections for her. She was the luckiest girl in the world and didn’t even appreciate it! That summer, Rob presumably went back to his hometown a few hours’ drive away, and I did whatever 15-year-olds did before cell phones and social media – went to camp, swam with my friends, wrote poetry, listened to cassette tapes of the Indigo Girls. Even without regular sightings or rumors to feed it, the crush remained on a low simmer. This ill-informed infatuation had become part of my teenage identity.

That fall, my affections reached a rolling boil. I joined the brother school’s pep band, which meant I had more chances for encounters with my beloved, who played the saxophone in addition to acting and singing (Was there anything he couldn’t do?!?). My sixteenth birthday fortuitously overlapped with a Friday night football game, and after Rob overheard my friends tittering about it in tones intended for eavesdropping, he spontaneously played “Happy Birthday” for me. We had still never had an actual conversation, and I was still not the type of girl who had the confidence to relocate down two rows of bleachers to actually flirt with him. My crush was fueled entirely by these crumbs of serendipitous contact.

Not long after my birthday, emboldened by the saxophone serenade and my sparkling new smile that had been very recently liberated from orthodontic torture, I decided it was time to confess my love for Rob in the most low-risk way possible: by writing him a letter. It made sense that letters would be my love language. I had met my friend Alison at camp in the summer after eighth grade, and even though she lived only two hours away by car, we were a couple years away from being licensed drivers, and our parents didn’t leap at the chance to chauffeur us regularly across state lines. In the days before email and texting, when our family’s only phone was umbilically attached to the wall of the kitchen and every minute cost money, Alison may as well have lived on the moon. So we turned to snail mail to stay in touch, and in the mid-1990s the postal route between Chattanooga and Atlanta became a superhighway of Mary Engelbreit stationery speeding between our homes. Those letters to my faraway friend became a primary mode of expression in those formative years.

This is all to say that I considered myself a woman of words, particularly adept in the epistolary arts. The heart of my first missive to Rob was a poem I had written about a time when he had walked by me and not noticed me. I had decided – in lengthy and erudite consultation with my friends – that it was the best poem I had ever written, and it just felt like it was too high a caliber of literature to keep to myself. (See Appendix A if you really want to read it. Compared to my other poetry of that era, it really is a winner.) I printed out the poem in a flowery font and followed it with some commentary, admitting that this probably seemed rather creepy but suggesting that someday far in the future he would be 50 years old and would appreciate the fact that he’d had a secret admirer in his youth. I also pleaded with him to reply by writing to Alison’s address and putting FROM ROB on the envelope. He never did.

Nevertheless I persisted. I sent two more Secret Admirer letters over the next few weeks – more specifically, I deputized friends to deliver them to Rob’s on-campus mailbox and adopted special-ops tactics like changing the font of each letter and switching messengers each time in case they were spotted. There were only two things that tied the letters together: I placed each one in an envelope I’d folded from a magazine page, and in each one I continued to confess my awareness that this was all very strange and probably freaking him out.

In the second letter, I turned to professional poetry, commending to him the song “Ghost” by the Indigo Girls, which I felt perfectly encapsulated my tortured feelings. (“And there’s not enough room in this world for my pain/Signals cross and love gets lost and time passed makes it plain/Of all my demon spirits I need you the most/I’m in love with your ghost.”) While I did manage to actually talk to Rob a couple times that fall – only when I was surrounded by a gaggle of girlfriends – he really was more of a phantom than an actual person to me. I continued to rely on interpersonal sleuthing to learn almost everything I knew about him, and much of it wasn’t terribly flattering. Instead of taking the wind out of my sails, this intelligence gathering only helped me construct an image of Rob as a tormented and bifurcated soul, misunderstood by almost everyone. I, of course, was one of the exceptional few who could see through to his true character, if only he would write me back already and give me the chance!

When I wonder now why I embraced this notion that I could identify my soulmate with next-to-no information about him, I have to remind myself that I came of age in the golden era of romantic comedies. In late 1994, Nora Ephron was just hitting her stride, Reality Bites was only a few months old, even Before Sunrise was still just a twinkle in the eyes of its creators. One of the first movies I saw in the theater without my parents was “Only You.” This sappy romantic comedy has a 53% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning most critics thought it was a giant splat. But 16-year-old me returned to the theater multiple times to see the movie widely described as “cloying” and “sappy,” admiring the main character’s dedication to following a man she’d never met halfway around the world. 

The movie opens on a young Marisa Tomei, who plays a schoolteacher named Faith who is wistfully lecturing her class on the concept of destiny and the Platonic ideal of souls finding their other half. Faith is on the brink of making the life-altering mistake of marrying a podiatrist named Dwayne, even though a Ouija board told her very clearly when she was 11 years old that her true love was named Damon Bradley. Less than two weeks before her wedding, Faith receives a phone call from a friend of her fiance’s – named Damon Bradley! – politely declining the invitation to their wedding because he’s leaving for Venice that very afternoon. Her response is to take a cab to the airport, wearing her wedding dress, to spontaneously purchase a plane ticket and chase this poor man around Italy. Along the way she meets someone else, falls in love in under twelve hours, and they dance on the streets of Rome while a busker plays “Some Enchanted Evening” on the saxophone. Of course there are some zany misunderstandings, but it all culminates in a good old-fashioned airport chase scene, and by the time the credits roll to a Michael Bolton song, Faith and her new fella are jetting off to their happy ending.

South Pacific! On the saxophone! While this was the only single element of the movie that bore any resemblance to my situation, I took it as a sign that I was on the right track in relentlessly pursuing my own self-constructed destiny. More importantly, it reinforced the idea that true romance almost necessarily involved foolhardy decisions like buying international plane tickets on a schoolteacher’s salary. If you relied on your frontal lobe too much, could it really be love?

Shortly before Christmas break, I decided it was time to confess my identity. Rob was clearly not interested in being pen pals, and there was only one semester left before he graduated. My fate needed an assist. I penned my last letter, this time in my own handwriting, and mailed it to his home address so maybe Santa could leave it in his stocking. I told him I was “ready to move on from this era of my life” (in high school time, an “era” is three months). The next time I saw Rob was three weeks later at the first rehearsal for the spring musical: Hello, Dolly! We encountered each other in a narrow hallway backstage and it is the closest I’ve ever come to passing out in public for non-medical reasons. I fled the scene as quickly as possible. Apparently I had not washed that man right out of my hair.

Eventually I did manage to have a conversation with Rob, at a school dance the following week. It was a “decades dance,” and I remember we were both wearing a lot of polyester as we leaned against the concrete-block wall outside the school gym. Rob was very sweaty. We didn’t talk about the elephant in the room, but he asked if he could call my house, and the following weekend he did. My mom and sister were away at a Girl Scouts sleepover and my dad wasn’t really minding the store, so I talked with Rob for over an hour, covering topics such as whether he had guessed my identity (he claimed he had) and which of his friends knew about the whole thing. I sent Alison a multi-page transcript of our conversation, convinced I had received glimpses into Rob’s wisdom and true nature.

In February, he called again and invited me to the Student Council Dance. It was my first real date, and my mom bought me a beautiful dress at Laura Ashley for the occasion – the only non-floral, streamlined dress in the entire store, a timeless and tasteful A-line in navy wool crepe that I have worn many times over the years, always with a touch of wistfulness. That afternoon, I went to my friend Karen’s house so we could get dressed and do our hair and makeup and wait for our dates. Rob was late picking me up, so much so that I thought he may have (reasonably) changed his mind. Eventually he showed up in a car he’d borrowed from a dormmate, wearing a blazer and tie. He took me to dinner at one of the nicest restaurants in town, where I ordered the Cornish game hen and later wondered why I’d chosen an entree that required so much dissection. We made an appearance at the dance, where I briefly discovered the joys of slow dancing and once again observed that Rob had a tendency toward perspiration. The magical night ended rather abruptly when he realized he would miss his curfew if he drove me all the way back to Karen’s house, so I hitched a ride with a friend, wondering whether I had just missed my first kiss.

Despite this hiccup, I thought all signs were pointing toward a prom date and then marriage, but I didn’t hear much from Rob after that. I think he called a couple more times, and I’m sure we overlapped occasionally at musical practices. Truth be told, I really remember very little about our interactions or what we discussed, and in the archive of my letters to Alison I barely wrote about it. In hindsight I can admit that our interactions were always overlaid with awkwardness. My image of Rob and our relationship (such as it was) were the direct product of my engineering, not the result of a natural chemistry. The reality didn’t live up to my fantasy. After so much hype, I honestly don’t know how it could have even stood a chance.

About a month after the dance, I learned that Rob had met another girl on a college tour and decided he wanted to date someone his own age who had never stalked him. We talked occasionally and took a photo together at his graduation, and since then I have seen him exactly once, after I graduated from college and we briefly worked in the same office building. One afternoon my elevator landed on the wrong floor, and the doors opened to reveal Rob sitting at a reception desk just a few feet away. We both froze and stared awkwardly at each other for a few interminable seconds while my fingers desperately tried to find the button that would command the elevator to move on and spare me the image of Rob’s face turning beet red, which I was sure was mirroring my own. I spent the next few weeks before I left for a new job carefully avoiding his floor, not eager to let the doors reopen on that chapter from my past.

A lot had happened in those few years since we had last seen each other. I started dating someone for real after my junior year of high school. In that relationship I learned a lot about what not to do, and I finally broke up with him midway through my sophomore year of college. Just three months later I met the man I would later marry. We lived in different parts of the country when we were introduced by a friend, and our relationship was forged through – you guessed it – letters and a new-fangled thing called email. I never casually dated or had a one-night stand. I just always gravitated to the deep end of the pool and dove in.

What I remember three decades after my time as Rob’s Secret Admirer is that I was a shy, artful, nerdy girl who did something bold to put myself on the radar of a guy I liked. I still have my journals from high school, and when I pulled them out to check my memories against the written record, I was reminded of the roller coaster of adolescence, how every encounter of daily life left me reeling with feelings I could only process through mediocre and hyperbolic poetry.

Those pages were also a reminder of how much the world has changed and how much I have changed with it. In the analog era, Marisa Tomei had to log some serious frequent flier miles and interrogate hotel concierges to track her man, a more glamorous version of my high school fact-finding mission. Now with a few keystrokes I can discover what Rob is up to these days. He’s a real estate agent in New York City, and I found some pictures on Facebook of him with his wife and young children. They’re on his wife’s profile – he doesn’t have a social media presence, perhaps because I scarred him for life?

One of my high school friends once said to me, in an attempt to assuage my adolescent despair over whether I would actually marry Rob someday: “Rebecca, one thing you know for sure is that he’ll never forget you.” Rob and I are both now edging pretty close to being 50 and perhaps, as I predicted in that first letter, he does occasionally remember being the object of my affection. Perhaps he appreciates it; perhaps he cringes. Either way, I think my friend was right that – for better or worse – I have the dubious honor of being etched in his memory.

From the safety of middle age, I can look back with amusement at my earnestness and how I wore my heart on my sleeve…and on the page. I’m grateful for the equilibrium of adulthood, but I’m also glad that my girlhood self isn’t entirely relegated to those dusty notebooks in the basement, that there are elements of her that surface every now and then. A few years ago Alison and I went to hear the Indigo Girls perform with the Atlanta Symphony. It was the first time we’d been to one of their concerts together, after all those years when their music provided the soundtrack to our dreams. When the orchestra broke into the opening phrases of “Ghost,” I looked over at my old friend and we both started laughing until tears were streaming down our cheeks, even as we sang along to every word.

Appendix A: The Poem

As he walks naturally by

Little does he know

That a pair of eyes is tracing his every step

A tender heart is excitedly beating

They are soaking in every detail

To add to an already long list

Of trivial facts and tidbits

He doesn’t recognize a face in this crowd

But one of them eagerly seeks his out

To see again its every detail

Longing to know it personally

Not from a secret photograph

That he does not know exists

And is a treasure to a stranger

While he goes on in a normal routine

A young heart flutters for him

Virgin lips stay sealed

Fragile hands grow clammy

And reach out to bring him back

But they grope in vain

He keeps walking

Ignorant of the passion he inspires