Adults who are Perpetually Stuck in High School

OP was stuffed in his locker over the Columbus Day weekend and the door was closed. No one noticed he was missing.

People who peaked in high-school are sad, sad people.

R3, but people who peeked in locker rooms have dong stories to tell.

Yes.

I've known the other kind--who are stuck in the misery of high school and keep rehashing it decades later.

Hold onto sixteen as long as you can!

But I think Trump is stuck in kindergarten.

I know some people who peaked in high school. I don’t know if they spend all their time missing it, but they don’t seem to have done much since. Their lives never change with the exception of adding a kid to the mix every few years. Still with their high school girlfriend, never made another friend outside high school friends, live within 5 miles of the family home, holiday at the same place each year. Some are really fat. I don’t know if they’re unhappy, maybe they like the sameness and dislike change.

Some people consider their high school years "the best years" of their lives. That's pretty damn sad.

Is it wrong that age 57 when someone brings up high school or asks me about it I just laugh and change the subject. I feel no connection to anything that happened back then. Feels like some other person in some other life.

It’s not wrong r10, depends what school meant to you. I had a good experience, I’m still in touch with some of my friends but I have no desire to go back. I give it very little thought these days, I’ve moved on but I enjoyed it while it lasted.

I find it bizarre how people who weren't even friends in high school are all excited to find each other on Facebook then meet up. I saw this one woman using the hashtag #90sbuddies about this lad I know for a fact she never exchanged two words with.

It's kinda sad to be trapped in high school either because it was the best time of your life or the worst time of your life. For me, it was dull and uneventful and I couldn't wait to get out. Somehow, we really didn't have any cliques and everyone liked each other well enough. It was just boring is all.

I've heard a lot of people say they'd love to go back to high school, but I never would. Now, college...that's another story. I LOVED college - I made true lifelong friends, felt independent for the first time in my life, experienced views different from my own, learned a lot, and had fun doing it.

I dated a guy who was in his 30's who was still stuck in high school. He was a camera man for a local tv station. It was super weird to me. His apartment had photos and crap from HS and I know he still hung around with his old friends quite a bit. He was also a total alcoholic, so not a prize by any stretch.

Was his name Brick?

I scored four touch downs in one game.

There are quite a few older men (40s) at my gym who act like teenagers. They bully, they’re homophobic. They don’t have wives or kids. Maybe it’s always been that way with single, child-less middle aged men?

That was probably the best time of their life. I miss the free time but high school was the worst I'm so glad it's over.

[quote]Do you know anyone like this?

The entire city of Chicago, and if they went to a Catholic school, they're even worse. Seriously, I have never seen a town where grown men still hang around with the same group of guys they went to high school with like Chicago.

Weird.

Only male ex football players and female ex cheerleaders.

For me, high school was neither great nor terrible. It just happened. I did what I had to do and then left. I was always a loner. I hardly spoke to anyone and didn't participate in any activities. Just went to school and then home. Since I didn't talk to them then I see no reason to now. I still glance at their social media accounts out of curiosity, though.

There is one cheerleader who was always overly obsessed with school spirit. She wore the varsity jacket everywhere she went and was at every sports game you could imagine. After she graduated she started her own photography studio in the area and honest to God I think it was just so she'd have an excuse to still go to the high school sports games and take pictures. That is how obsessed she was.

R22 is still stuck in high school.

People like this always make me think of AL Bundy

[quote]For me, high school was neither great nor terrible. It just happened.

Same. I really didn't give high school much thought once I left it. College was exponentially better. I was surrounded by smarter, more interesting people and the freedom of no longer being under your parent's roof.

Enough with stories about ourselves and back to the point of the thread: Adults stuck in high school. Unless, you’re still stuck in high school.

Thank you.

That's all I heard about Brenda and Eddy

R8 The people i'm referring to are exactly as you describe.

I know a 24 year old woman who still hangs out with all her HS friends. I'm guessing she was popular in HS because she seems to really miss that part of her life. She even still maintains an on-again-off-again fling with her high school boyfriend, AKA the only guy she's ever dated.

I think she's aware that she peaked in high school because she hasn't accomplished much since graduation, and instead lies about every detail of her life.

She claims to have attended an Ivy League University (she dropped out of community college). She claims to be a best selling author (She self-published a book with several spelling errors). And she claims to have a romantic relationship with a famous country singer (I really doubt this is true).

What's even worse is that all her friends believe her bullshit stories. Whenever they all get together, they act like a bunch of giggling 14 year olds and reminisce over high school. It makes me really uncomfortable. I don't understand the psychology behind this.

There was a guy who graduated from my high school who used to come around at lunch and hang out in the parking lot with his (still in high school) buddies — he was a year or two out of school.

That just seemed sad.

I was disappointed because I went to an elite college, to find my high school friends were quite a bit smarter - disappointed because I never really fit in too well back in h.s. and it was even worse in college when it should have been better.

R30 is stuck in high school.

Dunno if college is much better, where arrested development and a lot of men are concerned, anyway. I refer to this one frienemy of mine (white, early 60s, pretends to be liberal while actually being a racist, misogynistic, homophobic xenophobe) as "The Eternal College Frat Boy."

Watch Young Adult with Charlize Theron, I love that movie and it's basically about that.

I'm not stuck in high school. I will say though the Catholic school I attended was fully washed over with the Vatican II reforms. It was I like to put it as my subversive education and the very reason I washed out my first try at college. Because that college just re-hashed shit I'd learned in high school.

Grad school were plain flat out morons and hillbillies. Except for one guy but he became very money mad.... So I'm stuck. HS was not the best time of my life, but I have to say, it was the time when I was around the best people.

R28/OP She’s only 24, there’s still time for her to do something with her life and expand her friendship group outside her high school circle. The guys I know are 13 years older than she is. Their lives have barely changed since leaving high school. A couple went to college, came back to their hometown where there was no chance of getting a job in their field and never did a thing with their degree. Most of them drink too much and over eat. And I can’t work out if they’re just comfortable with the routine of it all (“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” type thinking) or if they’re just drinking and eating their boredom and self loathing away.

I think Young Adult is probably the best movie about arrested development there is. It's both hilarious and heartbreaking.

Although he later wrote Glory Days, a listen to Brice Springsteen's earlier albums showed he was still obsessed with high school until his early 30s.

He later said he didn't fit in at high school...

I am friendly with one person from high school. Our conversations often center around the people we knew in school. She's a hairstylist so quite a few locals go to her. I am FB friends with many of my former classmates and don't think any of them are stuck in HS. But whenever I see their posts, I remember the young version of them. I went to a very small school, most people were together from kindergarten to 12 grade, and there were under 100 kids in the class, so by graduation you definitely knew everyone. I went to a massive university and made some close friends but not as close as my high school friends.

I work with a guy who talks about Basic Training all the time. He's 40.

OP has just summed up the vast majority of gay men.

I have a reunion scheduled for next year. I've never seen any of these people since graduation and damned if I want to see them now.

I do not know a gay man in NYC (where I live) or anywhere else "stuck in high school". Ditto college. Most gay men, cannot speak for lesbians, come out after high school so their best days (in youth) happen more or less after (high school and even college). My 'best days" in youth were hardly high school. My God, when I came out at 19 or 20 more or less and integrated into the NYC gay community- life began, and what a ride. Not before. Not even college really. And I know a lot of heterosexual friends think of college as the last of their carefree, optimistic- life is all ahead- days. Not me, and pretty much all my contemporaries. Maybe guys now, still in their 20s feel that way, or even 30's, but not me.

Not dtom my experience homophobe at R41. I will say that closeted gay men act high school, not openly gay, from my experience.

*from

I do know people like this. I also know people, including my sister, who still reference how awful high school was and are still bitter about it decades after the fact.

Pop culture teaches us that these are the only two options - high school was the best time of your life or it was a horrendous experience if you were an outsider or undesirable. Certainly, both of those things happen. But, I'm betting there's a silent majority of people for whom high school was just fine, "meh" - some good times, some bad times, and then it was over and you moved on with your life.

I think a few people on this thread have said that r46. It’s over, it was fine, people have moved on.

Honestly the bitter people are far more annoying than the “high school was the best” people. Why do they let this define them? It’s embarrassing that they’re not over it 20 years later.

Agree, R47.

R31 Along with all of the crazy fraus and all of their mindless swooning on the Jonathan Groff/Luke Evans/Henry Cavill threads.

Aren’t these the people who go on to become ‘actors’?

For me, high school was about getting to college and college was about getting to New York. Recently, I went to my 25th high school reunion. It was my first reunion I went to. I had a blast. A whole weekend hanging out with people I barely remembered but by the end, we were all friends. I can't wait for my 30th.

Rarely think about high school, and if I do, it's because of Facebook, which has looped us all back to our pasts in ways we never saw coming.

My high school is massive. And Southern. Last year they started a Hall of Fame, and it's likely I will be selected for that in a couple of years, and that gives me very mixed feelings, cause I know the school and school district are still incredibly homophobic. But better to go and represent, I think, than to simply turn down the honor.

I worked with a woman who was about 31-32, that was still emulating Mean Girls. She got off on power trips and pitting people against each other. She had been at this job over 12 years, no college, and god forbid she ever read a management book. Her whole managerial style was "ambush and accuse". I stayed 7 months, which was about 3 months too long.

I wanted to skip HS and go straight to college, just to get out of the house. Moved out at 18, and never went back.

Yes OP I do. A lot of DL'ers that's who lol! Petty, catty, constantly hating on women, and this fat Dominican bitch I knew. Fuck! We were friends for years but she kept bitching about her old highschool and she wishes she could go back in time and stay there (and not transfer to HS of Fashion Industries).....even though it would have meant she and I would never have been friends. Well after the ages of 17-29 I had enough. Dropped her. Lol she's probably fat, ugly and miserable now with a kid and chasing after white dick with zero self respect lol. Oh well!

Why does every single person think they were "the outsider"?

"But deep inside I felt I didn't belong"

I had a blast at the prom!

I’m still stuck in high school...my glory years...or, I know a guy who still wears his prom king crown.

That’s the point of this thread.

I hated my high school. Now, college was a completely different story. I graduated high school at 17. I began to fill out that summer after graduation, and my freshman year at college. I became quite handsome, and fucked my way thru the next 3 years. It was a blast.

Omg ^^

When I was 30 I started a job where a co-worker was someone I'd gone to high school with. She'd been a raving cunt but I hadn't seen her since she graduated (when I was 15, so 15 years earlier) and figured it wouldn't be a problem.

Within a week she came running up to me and a co-worker at lunch talking, and I'd just mentioned having been at a party. "Don't LIE, you never got INVITED to PARTIES you dork!" she screamed.

Took us half a minute to realize she was talking about high school. Everyone just kind of stared. And she wasn't happy when it came out I was 3 years behind her in school -- she'd been lying about her age.

Haven't seen her in a while but last I knew she was 40 or 41 and still jabbering on about high school. Yeesh.

"I began to fill out that summer after graduation, and my freshman year at college. I became quite handsome, and fucked my way thru the next 3 years. It was a blast."

You sound like you have the same mentality as you did when you were a young dumb twink.

There's a guy from my high school days I wouldn't mind having stuck in me. Had a crush on him since we were kids. The one regret from those high school years is not pursuing it.

Many of my high school classmates married each other and still live in the same city. Lots of fraus.

I don't get home much but when I inevitably bump into one of them, it's like they never changed.

The self proclaimed coolest guy and girl in my final year of HS dated. Of course. They dressed as He-Man and Shera on one of our final dress-up days. They're married now, still living in the same town, socialising with the same set of plebs who idolised them during school days. Some might find their story adorable...

Then they aren't adults, OP.

They're just idiots.

I don't really miss my high school classmates all that much, but I do miss being a teenager and having the whole world out there in front of you. I'm still obsessed with everything '80s. The music, MTV, slasher horror films, etc. Those were the days!

Most of the people from my high school got married to each other, divorced, then married a different student from the same school. It's creepy.

And they're probably all Facebook friends too, R67?

R57 this isn't a thesis

Probably, r67, but I avoided that particular hell.

It did put into context all the crazy stepsibling situations I heard about when I was a kid:. These families just interbreed with each other for generations.

If everyone’s life stories were identical, we’d all be boring af.

My bfs parents know two couples who all went to school together. Best friends married to their childhood sweethearts. At some point, however, the husband of one couple started sleeping with the wife of the other couple. They ended up running off together leaving their kids (three each) behind. So the two who were left behind naturally started helping each other out. One thing led to another and eventually they ended together.

To me that’s the ultimate in never getting over high school, four people who never contemplated life outside the familiar. Not even bad marriages could get them to consider hooking up with someone outside the group they went to high school with. They just swapped partners.

One of the 9/11 widows was like that -- she and her husband were high school sweethearts who continued to hang out with their high school friends even in their 30s, and when her husband was killed, she ended up marrying his best friend and best man at their wedding.

I quit in 10th grade. Took GED and went to college which was the greatest. Been out a few years and miss it.

It seems half the people in my graduating class married each other, and many stayed in my hometown.

Teaching seems to have been the go-to profession; better to get back into that high school.

I wonder if they’re bored r75 or just relieved they didn’t have to go out and meet someone new. In the same way I look at their life with horror, I wonder if they look at mine with pity. Maybe they feel sorry for me because I didn’t find my true love while still in my teens, and my life is their nightmare. Maybe they think I envy them because my partner wasn’t the kid I sat next to in math circa 1996.

I don't see anything wrong with keeping childhood and teen-hood friends. Those should be cherished. But I agree you shouldn't be mentally stuck in the past. You can keep friends from childhood but still act and think like an adult. It is sad when people wax poetic about high school.

I hated high school and couldn't wait to get out.

Perpetually stuck in my mind, however, is what my classmates looked like naked in the showers.