@TQfromtheU thank you for the suggestions! The kissing booth story is great!
I think her being smart and tall make dating more complicated in high school. That was my experience forty years ago. I did date, but there were no big romantic involvements with boys from my school.
Note I said boys from my school. I met boys outside of school and had no trouble getting them to ask me out. I am sure they could tell I was smart, but they weren’t as focused on that.They didn’t know my class rank, but knew I was a cute blonde.
These days girls often go to dances in groups or kids go in big, coed friendship groups. My kids did that, and when I compare it to my experience going with just one guy, I think they got the better deal.
My daughter is very smart, petite, and I think quite pretty. She used to ask the, “why not me?” question once in a while in high school as well. She never ended up going to a high school dance or prom. There’s a half sewn (self taught amazing seamstress too!) senior prom dress in her closet still. However, when she went to college, she met a boy on her dorm floor during the first semester, and they have been dating for almost three years now. He’s a lovely boy who clearly loves and respects her. So just because it doesn’t happen in high school doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen.
There was quite a long thread here about late-bloomers, where people discussed how their kids never dated in HS or some even in College. Most of the stories ended well with the kid starting to date after graduation or in their 20’s.
I was starting center for the junior high girls basketball team. And also one of the top students. And just plain nerdy. It was a deadly combination that took years to overcome LOL.
Tell your daughter to hang in there. I always felt like I just didn’t have much in common with the boys in my high school. I went away to college, majored in engineering, was surrounded by guys geekier than me and had a nice dating life.
There was one guy I dated in college that I was very serious about. (Even took him home to meet the parents. And went to meet his. It required buying plane tickets.) He once told me he had never pictured himself marrying another engineer. He said he always pictured himself with a teacher, or housewife. Long story short: My husband that I’ve been with for over 25 years never had that same vision and actually appreciates that we are equals.
I think some people are better than others at subtle flirting. I’m talking about things like leaning closer and smiling at the right times. Such things may make a person (man or woman) seem more accessible and may encourage someone to take a chance on asking them out.
My son totally would not date a girl taller than him when he was in high school. He was also the kid who thought about how to do the elaborate hoco (As they seem to call it here) proposals. But he was (and is) attracted to the smart girls. So from listening to him and his friends her height may have something to do with it and all the leadership positions may have something to do with it too. Some guys don’t want to be overshadowed by the girl. (A lot of guys). They want to be top dog at that age. She will do fine as she gets older. From a mom who has a D who got way too involved with guys (and gave up college for one - that later dumped her - and never has gone) that no guy is not the worst thing in the world but it can hurt. I was valedictorian of my hs but was lucky to have a boyfriend all through hs. Honestly I drove the initial contact, just being around him a lot, giving him lots of hints, etc. He was not academically where I was but was lots of fun! It worked out well. Good luck!
Yes, it was hard, and it remained hard well into my 30s. It was hard for many of my beautiful, funny, brilliant straight women friends at Harvard Law. Many of us found partners, but some have not. My husband is a fabulous match for me, but I met him at 38 after many years of deliberate and frustrating and time-consuming searching, including a lot of heartbreak when promising relationships ended.
I help some of my friends with online dating. It’s very much like college admission.
My experience … very hard to be tall and smart in high school. And … it gets better!
Luckily – and we have more proof of it 24/7 on the news right now – high school is not representative of life. Or . . . it is representative of some aspects of life, but the balance is all off. There’s never a good answer to the question “Why not me?”, but usually if you wait a few years it becomes moot.
I always liked smart girls, but I could only really like (like “that way”) one or two of them at a time, and that hardly exhausted the universe of smart girls who would have liked me to like them. I was well aware of that at the time, but I didn’t feel secure enough about myself to be generous enough to those girls.
My smart daughter had absolutely no romantic action in high school. Her prom date was a friend from another school’s boyfriend that the friend loaned her for the evening, since at her school it was very unusual to go to prom uncoupled. (She knew him pretty well, since he had been part of their friendship group for a long time.) It wasn’t something that bothered her a lot, as far as I could tell. She was pretty confident that she would do fine in college, and she was willing to wait.
One thing that shocked me some as an adult observer of high school romance was how completely driven by the girls it was. At least among my kids’ friendship sets, as I observed it, girls who had boyfriends got those boyfriends not merely by throwing themselves at them, but by clubbing them over the head with a big stick, dragging them home, and then throwing themselves at them. It took a lot of effort. High school boys had very delicate egos and were by and large unwilling to take any risk of rejection. My daughter would have been happy for boys to like her, and she would have liked them back, but in the final analysis she wasn’t willing to spend the time and to make the compromises that some other girls made to have a boyfriend, at least not then.
Asking a girl out is not something every young man is good at or comfortable with. Picking up on ques that someone is interested in you is also something that can be difficult for many. Sometimes I think it’s a feedback loop problem. The first girl I ever went out with came and sat beside me at a play our sophomore year. She didn’t say anything and I just said “Hi”. A friend of mine who was sitting behind must have had a much better feel for what was happening. During the intermission he told me to talk to her and see if she wanted to hold hands. I did, she did, we dated for about 6 months. If it hadn’t have been for my friend I never would have known she liked me.
Yes, it was difficult for me in HS, and yes, it has been difficult for my smart daughters. And yes, things changed in college, as my mother assured me that they would (and I didn’t believe her until it happened).
My older daughter and her friends in HS were all very attractive, accomplished, studious girls. Most of them preferred group outings and thought that HS boys were too high maintenance to be worth the effort!
Thanks to all for the feedback! I do think things will get better for my daughter when she gets to college. As a 16 year old, she just feels like she’s waiting forever (but I know how quickly time flies!).
Maybe things have changed in college now, but I was astonished how many of the women at my 30th anniversary (Cambridge) college reunion had never married. A significant proportion of those who had, met their husbands in college. After that the pool of available guys who were their intellectual equal would have been pretty small.
I do wonder how things will work out for my daughter, having picked a college where she’s in the top 1% of admitted students.
My wife never dated in HS though, like others, she did attract quite a bit of attention when she travelled. The combination of high academics and being the best athlete in the school scared the young guys. She went to prom with a friend who was gay. I was her first serious boyfriend and we met her senior year of college. She dated a bit and hooked up a bit before that.
A big issue is that most of the smart boys, at least by us, do not date that much in HS either. A few do, some have programmers’ humps at 16 and don’t really show up as dating material, but most just don’t. S1 went on one date, senior prom, and S2 has never dated and is now a sophomore in college.
I’m not sure it always gets better in college. D went on a couple of dates in HS but only had one boyfriend in college for about two months. Oddly, she has had more marriage proposals than boyfriends. Even there she related better to the TAs than the average students as an Honors College student at big state U.
Around here, you have a friend find out if someone has a date and then drop a hint about you being available. Does she have any guy friends this can be done with?
DD’19 doesn’t have a date for Homecoming next week, yet. She is on Homecoming Court and there is an unattached boy also on Court that she gets along well with, so a friend suggested it to him but no word yet. He wasn’t going to go except he got on Court so maybe he doesn’t want to deal with it (though DD said to tell him he doesn’t need to make a poster to ask her and he can ignore her most of the night). At least at Homecoming it’s not a big deal, you don’t do Grand March and introductions with your date like at prom.
That said, DD is likely either val or sal but has had a couple of boyfriends and some admirers, so I don’t think anyone has been turned off by smarts. Sometimes the right people are just not at your school.
I was a smart girl in HS and had a boyfriend.My sister was a smart girl in HS and always had dates. D was a really smart girl in HS and had a boyfriend (they will celebrate their 3rd wedding anniversary soon). It seemed to me that a lot of the girls in my HS class who were the very popular girls (not me) were also smart. So maybe I went to an unusual school. but it didn’t seem that way to me.
Don’t know if I’m qualified to enter this discussion, but I would never have gotten married if a girl had not asked me out…
I like Sue22’s observation about flirting. I was good at that. I didn’t even realize how good I was until I went to college and other girls were teasing me for doing it. (I was a small town southerner at an Ivy.) Okay, so maybe your D doesn’t need to toss her hair and laugh at boys’ jokes. If she can ask boys questions about themselves, show her interest and get them talking, that will go a long way.
Thanks all again for the comments.
@Lizardly I agree with you about the flirting. Because I’m not present when she’s near the boys at school, I have no idea if or how she flirts. She told me that she does try to strike up conversations with boys she likes. I really can’t see her being the type of girl who acts super flirtatious, though.