Day Two: Your First Love

As it turns out, Jordan was my first love! Sadly, I was not his first love... this is a story of unrequited passion! Jordan and I grew up in the same ward. I never paid much attention to him because he was 2 years older. But poor 15 year old sophomore Amanda fell for the Senior class man. And, in a cruel twist of fate, he was dating someone else: Sarah (who, btw, was a very nice girl, but for the purposes of this story will be villainized...). Fan-freakin'-tastic.

So, of course, being the strategist I am, I worked on winning him over. The best way to describe it is that I made myself VERY available. I always tried to talk to him, and eventually we started emailing/talking on MSN/actually talking. I was totally infatuated. I mean, come on, how could I help it? He was so smart, so cute, and so interesting. Some of the silly things I did include:

-emailing him as a 16 year old. I know this doesn't seem silly, but YOU go back and read your emails from when you were 16 and you'll understand what I mean (to this day, Jordan threatens to re-read the emails out-loud to me when I'm bugging him).

-Asking him to MY prom when he was a high school grad. He was a great sport and came, but I'm fairly certain he wanted to gouge his eyes out.

-Asking him to drive down to Anchorage with me. I needed to catch a flight, and I was quite conniving knowing that we would be stuck in a car together for 6 hours. This didn't work out, sadly, but I sure did try...

-Going hiking in Denali National Park. I had this great romantic moment planned in my head. Jordan spent most of the time looking at his GPS and commenting how high above sea level we were.

-I tried to play the reverse psychology game. He asked me if he should go visit Sarah for Thanksgiving, and I said yes, he should go, hoping he would see the error of his ways and not go, fall for me, and we'd live happily ever after. I never said my reasoning skills were particularly brilliant at 16.

At the end of my junior year another guy asked me out (another long story I dub the "Sven story"), and I realized I deserved someone who liked me as much as I liked them. So I started looking at other options. I always kept Jordan in the back of my mind as a possibility, but I didn't really think anything would come of it (and it didn't until for another 2 years). But I do remember loving Jordan as much as I could bear, and it hurt quite a lot to not have those feelings returned. I remember asking myself why I cared for him so much back when the love was unrequited: I recognized that I was being crazy. But I realized I saw something really special in Jordan, something amazing and I wanted to be apart of that. And I still feel that way to this day.

Ok, saw it with me... Awwwwwwwwwwww....