It all started with a note: “Will u b my grlfrind?”

A ginger boy with crooked teeth and brown eyes smiled at me from across the room. How could I resist? That was the beginning of my longest relationship (sad I know). The next two years consisted of dates to dinners and each other’s’ houses, love letters, and eventually, cheating. Yes, a 9-year-old cheated.

Not generally what you’d expect from a “relationship” between 2 kids who were only 7 years old when we started “dating”. To clarify, we were “together” from second grade to fourth grade.

Now I know that most of you are thinking that there is no way that we actually had a functioning relationship that young, but somehow, we actually did a couple of things together. We would go on dinner dates (our favorite place was Panera Bread). His mom would pick me up and she would “drop us off” at the restaurant, but she would always come in and sit at another table to watch us. I would make him open the doors for me and do all the gentlemanly things that I had learned about from The Princess Bride, except “as you wish” because I wasn’t that crazy.

We would go over to each others’ houses for playDATES and our moms would make us snacks. At my house, we would swing on my swing set and play with stuffed animals. One of my favorite stuffed animals to this day is one that he gave me for my 8th birthday. His house was the absolute best, his mom was our music teacher and she, along with her mother, would teach me how to play piano and we would dance. I think I was more in love with his mom than him, honestly. She was THE COOLEST! I credit her for a lot of my love for music and would spend as much time with her as I could.

Everything was great between us – until 4th grade started.

I would try to talk to him at recess and at lunch but he never wanted to talk to me. One of our friends delivered a message to me saying that he thought that I was being mean to him and that was why he wouldn’t talk to me. He wrote me a love letter, and at the beginning of the school year,  I wrote him one back. That same week, I found out that he was “going steady” with another girl and he didn’t tell me or break up with me. He literally said that. He said: “We are going steady.” The worst thing was that he wasn’t even the one who told me. My friend, his new girlfriend, bragged to me about it. After I found that out, I took matters into my own hands. In our playground we had a climbing wall and he and his friends were standing on one side of it. I waited until everybody had assembled and I climbed the wall.

“I’m breaking up with you!”

Silence.

All his friends started freaking out as he just stared at me. It was the coolest, most epic thing I have ever done in my life. Literally, I have never done anything cooler in my life.

Moral of the story: Dating in elementary school is just as fun and dramatic as in high school, just with less R-rated details.