What I learned about coolness from a fishing trip
A little story to celebrate my wedding anniversary
It’s 2007. I’m a senior in high school. I’m trying to be cool, but I’m not sure that I am.
Historically, I’ve ridden the line between popular and not. I’ve always been involved in a lot of activities at school, which means I’m familiar with people in lots of different groups and they’re familiar with me. I do my best to be nice to everyone. Ultimately, I’m most comfortable with a group that outsiders might describe as nerdy. We talk a lot about college admissions and debrief about the answers on tests as soon as we’ve left the classroom, often descending into debates and/or nervous meltdowns on our way to the next AP class. I don’t go to parties and I spend most weekends with my family, but people seem to like me within the walls of the high school, at least. I don’t want to be nervous about dating, but I am. I imagine myself as a character in a John Hughes movie, awkward and cute and maybe slightly untouchable. A lot of my life happens on AIM. I’ve recently returned from a summer program that can only be described as “journalism camp” with a new level of confidence. The fact that it was journalism camp that gave that to me should tell you a lot.
There’s a cool boy among other cool boys who I kind of know from a distance. He’s a smart cool boy, so he’s been a regular presence in my honors classes since eighth grade—but he’s still cool. I see him dating pretty girls and talking to older kids in the hallway and he gets tons of attention for being a great athlete. We have a few mutual friends, but talking to him makes me nervous. Even my life-changing journalism camp experience hasn’t prepared me to put myself out there that much.
It’s 2009. I’m a sophomore in college. Plot twist: I’m actually dating the cool guy now.
The story that brought us together is one for another post (if you’re interested!).
Talking to him still makes me a little nervous, but at this point, I’m pretty sure it’s mostly just butterflies. Plus, we’ve both moved away from home for college, and it’s easier for me to believe that the connection is real now that we’re removed from the once-familiar dynamics that had sorted us into our previous social groups.
After a few months, the boy invites me to join him at his family’s cabin. It’s a place I’ve heard lots about, and while it doesn’t necessarily sound like my cup of tea, I’m excited to experience it firsthand. I’m too young to express it quite this way, but I’m also excited to experience the version of my boyfriend that I assume must come to life there and only there.
Currently Reading: Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo
This book is a tome (one of the many things I like about it), so I probably won’t bore you by shouting it out in every post until I finish reading it. Life with a five-month-old doesn’t allow for a ton of reading marathons, so I will likely be reading it for a while. But I think it’s fantastic! And Claire Lombardo makes me want to be a better writer. I’m less than halfway through Same As It Ever Was, and I’ve already given it a spot in my Bookshop dot org storefront.
I know he’s pretty into fishing—more specifically, fly fishing. I don’t really know what that is. My dad and I go deep sea fishing at the Jersey shore every summer, but I’m mostly in it for the quality time and the boat and my dad’s PB&J sandwiches. So when I’m told that my cool boyfriend is going to spend much of our weekend together at the cabin fly fishing, I don’t have a reference point beyond that. He’ll grab a fishing pole. He’ll catch some fish. Cool.
If, like me, you don’t know much anything about fly fishing, let me help. Here’s what it looks like:
Suddenly, Cool Boyfriend has pulled on a full fly fishing costume. The individual pieces of said costume are not cool, and the overall effect is certainly no better. But he emerges from wherever he found the waders and boots and hat and other waterproof items with total confidence and not an ounce of self-consciousness. It’s just, like, “I’m here to party,” with the exact same affect that I expect he had rolling into the high school parties to which I was never, ever invited.
I learn a powerful lesson that day—and it’s a lesson that I couldn’t learn from my parents or teen movies or even journalism camp. I’d spent my whole life pretending that I understood what made someone “cool” and being at peace with the fact that I maybe wasn’t. I wanted to be above it, but let’s be real: it bugged me. And dating a boy I’d once perceived as Popular—even as a slightly more self-actualized college girl—hadn’t made me feel that much better about myself.
It was the waders that did it.
In my river-bound boyfriend, I got the confirmation I needed that all of the maxims about confidence and being true to yourself that I’d heard to that point were absolutely true. In hindsight, it’s kind of a shame that I needed a cool boy to prove that to me when I was nineteen—but wasn’t that the way of every high school movie heroine you saw when you were a teenager?
I also can’t feel too ashamed because Cool Boyfriend is now my husband, and while he schooled me on this particular subject, we’ve been swapping life lessons for almost fifteen years. This week we celebrated eight years of marriage, which was the genesis of this little story. Cool Guy Matt continues to remind me that (cheese alert!) you’re as cool as you say you are, whether you’re seventeen, nineteen, or thirty-three.