Friends.

That was my view of the opposite sex when I was little.

Delicate friends.

They were friends who generally didn’t like to play football — and when they did, they cried every time we ‘played rough.’ The tomboys were the exception — those scary girls you never tried to get into fights with because they would throw the first punch.

I think I interacted a lot more with girls than with guys in the early days. I played a variation of ten-ten:

You may go-ooooo
You may go anywhere you like…
Can’t you see someone like you…
…One — Wolombo
Two — Together…

I jumped rope better than they did — I still can jump through a loop, make the rope go by twice while I’m still in the air, and jump backwards!

With the transition from primary to secondary school, like others, I became more aware of the changes taking place on both sides. It became something of an accomplishment to borrow a pencil from a girl. Your mate carrying on a normal (abnormal to us) conversation with a girl was deemed to be running PG (Private Gist). Should a girl say a simple ‘hello’ to you, your day was made :-D.

During that period, they were in a sense, sacred beings.

This continued for a while — that is, until I noticed other guys were getting along better with them than I was. A fraction of these guys got along much, much better — they were paired with members of the opposite sex.

I had been left behind…

In senior secondary school, I had no idea what came over me. Whatever it was, I’ll call it temporary madness.

The first thing I did was declare myself to be a misogynist. I think that was the first time a lot of my classmates heard that word. Even then, my vocabulary was huge — I got away with callipygian as an example of a five-syllable word in an English class once — but in this case, I didn’t really understand the full meaning of the word.

I avoided anything female like the plague. Very few of them dared to talk to me, and those who did got some biting remark in reply. The rest of the time, I behaved as if they weren’t even there. I think a lot of it came from some conclusion I made after watching my elder brother that if I dwelt too much on girls, I wouldn’t do well in school. Unsurprisingly, I was at the bottom of the class during that period and I only went back to the top after getting friendly with them.

Again, I have no idea how I got cured. I made up somehow, said my his and blended in. As a prefect, rumor had it that I hated girls, but it had more to do with the fact that I found it — and still find it — difficult to treat both sexes unequally. Punishment meted out to erring males was equal to that given to females, and given the physical difference, it was more like giving men’s work to ladies. I digress.

I’m in the university now, and my attitude towards girls as romantic interests is rather apathetic. I’ve had my share of crushes, but if I were to compare with most guys my age, its quite minimal.

I just might be heading towards my childhood where I can only see them as friends, or maybe I’ve been working and studying so hard, there hasn’t really been time to get to know them better.

* I clarified some parts of my post. Insertions are in underline.