My first relationship happened by accident. I complimented a classmate’s goggles and then he invited me to go to the chocolate shop with him. I didn’t recognize that as a flirtatious advance until after we’d been talking about time travel for half an hour and he told me how cool it was to finally have a girlfriend again. I thought, “Oh. Well. Whoops. I guess I might as well find out what dating is like.”
It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t fun, and by the time I’d decided that I didn’t like it, everyone in school knew about the relationship and all the adults were praising me for my good deeds. My school principal told me how great it was that I was there to provide calm, level-headed stability to his troubled genius, and how important that stability was while he took his college entrance exams.
I didn’t mind. It wasn’t torturous, anyway. I was warned that breaking up with him might inflict a devastating emotional blow that would harm his grades and test scores and blow his chances at MIT. So I endured for a whole semester and then, as we were walking down the steps of the building where we took our last test of the year, I told him I wanted to end the relationship.
Perhaps you can understand why I was so annoyed when he later got kicked out of his nuclear engineering major for cheating.
