Trip McNeely: College chicks are totally different, bro ….. They all talk about world issues and “ecolomological” crap. They all wanna date older guys.
Mike Dexter: Yeah, but… not all of ’em, right?
Trip McNeely: Way it goes….. I even tried crawling back to Janeen. She was all cozy with some senior. He’s a pre-med. They ALL are. Guys like us… we are a dime a dozen.
It didn’t take long for me to realize in my first quarter at Georgia Tech that my dating prospects were…. thin. First of all, I was attending a school where guys outnumbered girls five to one. Second of all, I was a freshman. Freshmen girls all wanted to go out with upperclassmen and there was no chance with any girls not freshmen. I only met a couple girls at Tech during my first quarter. The most notable event was at a pledge mixer between my fraternity and a sorority where I became re-acquainted with Sandi Stephens, a girl I went to elementary school with. She would go on to engage in a couple short-lived and drama-filled relationships with several of my fraternity brothers (but well, that’s their dating lives, we’re talking about mine here), but our friendship and her connection to her sorority would have implications further down the road and we’re a long time off from talking about that.
It wasn’t long before I was keeping tabs on what was happening back at the old high school. I had made several friends with sophmores and juniors when I was a senior at high school and so now that they were juniors and seniors, I would check back in with them. On weekends where all of us would have a break from college, friends would come back from college and we would hang out with our friends still in high school. We had lots of good times.
One such weekend, we were all together and one of the senior girls lamented her dating life and stated that she would probably have to miss her own senior prom because no one would take her. I flippantly replied that I’d take her to her prom if she would go with me to my fraternity formal and she shocked me by saying it was a deal. I was floored! I didn’t think she was serious, but after talking to her a couple more times during the next few weeks, it was apparent that she was. During Christmas break, our church had a dinner for couples, all very innocuous and innocent and a friend of mine suggested I take this girl and go with him and his girlfriend. I figured, “why not?” and so we all went together and had some good fun.
My fraternity winter formal approached and sure enough, she was still interested in going with me, so we went and again had a pretty good time. We did some more things together over the next couple of months, but whatever he had going was pretty undefined. I remember a friend at Tech asking me, “So, is she your girlfriend?” and I responded, “I don’t know.” There certainly was no implied commitment. She seemed to have no problem going on dates with other guys and didn’t seem to mind that I spent time with other girls.
So, it seemed to be a pretty good setup. I wasn’t ready to push the issue yet, I was just glad to eat dinner with someone and share a couple laughs. There was a whole lot of uncertainty about the whole situation, but I felt like I was in a good place where I hadn’t invested too much yet. This went on for a couple months seemingly well, but in such an unpredictable and unstable endeavour, eventually the circumstances must change and of course, they did.