When the boy with the sleeve tattoo, eyebrow piercing, and beaten up truck asks you out to dinner, don’t hastily disapprove of him and say maybe next time knowing that there will never actually be a next time because he’s ‘just not what you’re looking for right now’. Say yes. I know you think that the instant you agree your mother will turn over in her grave, and the movement will sound a lot like didn’t I raise you better than this young lady, but she won’t and maybe she did or maybe she didn’t—it doesn’t really matter. I know you won’t believe it at first, but he will appreciate how beautiful you are better than any of the well-groomed boys your mother forced on your doorstep all throughout high school (that later that night always proved themselves to be assholes).
This boy will pull out your chair, pour your wine, and pay the bill in full without ever asking you to chip in your fair share. Watching his father love his mother through only hard fists and well-heard shouts quickly taught him to love better than that. These days, every woman he takes out has his mother’s smile and he’ll do anything and everything in his power to keep seeing it over and over. And not the way he last saw it, when she was dying and his presence at her side was all she’d had to be thankful for in over eighteen long years.
The boy with the shirt stained with grease, the holey jeans, and the cigarettes he won’t offer you because “it’s a filthy habit that I’m trying to kick, truly,” is going to love you the only way he knows how—unbelievably hard and with everything he possesses. He is going to love you so well that even when he breaks your heart, or you break his, it will be different than all of the others before him. It will be gentle where others have been vicious and you’ll leave as friends, fond and comfortable with your relationship long after it has ended. It will be graceful, something that you had never associated with breakups until you met him, and you will have grown to love him so much that when it is finally over for good, all you’ll have to say is, “your mother would be proud.”
