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The original was posted on /r/bestofredditorupdates by /u/Direct-Caterpillar77 on 2025-11-01 04:02:02+00:00.

I am not The OOP, OOP is u/NoJob7202

AITA for proving to my boyfriend the “nerds” never cared about the “popular” kids in high school?

Originally posted to r/AmItheAsshole

Thanks to u/coffeegull for suggesting this BoRU & u/Sanarry for finding the link

Original Post - rareddit March 22, 2024

My boyfriend and I (both 25) went to the same high school.

My boyfriend was talking about our high school days. He thought high school me would have been thrilled to date the “popular” guy because I was a “nerd.” Mind you, we’re 25 and it’s 2024.

I played along for a bit until I realized he wasn’t joking. He literally thought that. I told him that I didn’t know he existed. He was surprised and said that he was a popular kid. He played football and was in the popular crowd. He said that I must have been lying.

I told him that the “nerds” never cared about the “popular” kids in high school because we were fiercely competing amongst ourselves for college admissions.

For a backstory on our town, my boyfriend was born and raised there but I only moved when I was 13 along with a bunch of other high achieving kids. That’s because an engineering company opened up a branch near that town and brought in a ton of engineers and their families.

So it was a sleepy town with a big high school that suddenly got a ton of competitive kids. And I mean insanely competitive.

Nobody had time to think about popular kids or really anything but college admissions. I was only getting four or five hours of sleep a night regularly. Sports like football or cheerleading which required 5 days a week of training at school were out of the question.

And I saw the same people regularly because we were all in the same classes. So all of the drama was contained within that group of 50-100 or so students. It paid off for me. I got into a top college and had no student loans. It was literally cheaper than the state school. (And despite my autogenerated username, I do have a good job that I enjoy.)

My bf said I’m lying. I don’t like being called a liar.

So I literally reached out to all of my high school “nerd” friends and yep they didn’t know the popular group and the ins and outs of the dynamics like my bf thought. A few people recognized some names, but like I said, we were really focused on competing with each other.

He got quiet when I proved my case. He said I humiliated him and I proved my point and we should never mention high school again. I talked with his sister and she said that high school was a special experience for him and I ruined his memories. AITA?

VERDICT: NOT THE ASSHOLE

RELEVANT COMMENTS

nick2kool4skool

NTA. I won’t echo the “peaked in highschool” thing cuz while it may have an echo of truth, I also think it’s reductive. I think it’s more important for your boyfriend to realize that the reason “nerds” bond together in places like highschool, and why weirdos/nerds/freaks/geeks self identify as such despite implied social stigma, is that it’s a conscious act of defiance against the notion that their self worth is solely defined by the dominant social hierarchy.

OOP

I’m going to be really honest here. It was not about defiance in any way for us.

In fact, we played more heavily into a social hierarchy measured by the prestige of your college and perceived pathway. It was a very competitive and unhealthy environment.

The reason I or other people didn’t care about “popular kids or freaks or weirdos” because they weren’t competitors.If my boyfriend was a student athlete who had great stats, we would all have known and cared.

It’s not a good thing but it’s the reality of many high achieving students in high schools.

Sirix_8472

NTA

But why does your bf feel a need for OTHERS to validate HIS highschool experience?

Why can’t he just remember it as he did and that be that? Nothings changed.

Edit to say: these are rhetorical questions for OP…we all already know the answer

~

Varietygamer_928

NTA… it begs the question why your bf feels the need to feel superior in your relationship.

OOP

He doesn’t really have a superiority complex, he just saw those TikToks talking about “my bf/gf in high school vs me” and thought about us because we were in high school.

On the flip side, he loves those jokes about one person having a silly job (like him) while their partner has a serious job with real world ramifications

I think he just liked the idea of me having a crush on him in high school back in the day when life wasn’t complicated and real.

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Poctah

Nta. I also agree with you. I went to a huge highschool with around 600 kids in each grade(so 2.4k total). I honestly didn’t even know a lot of the kids in my grade and really just stuck to my group of about 50 kids(we were the emo kids). We could have cared less about any other groups of kids and couldn’t tell if you anyone was popular🤷‍♀️.

OOP

That was so similar to my experience! At our graduation I was like “wtf are those people”.

It’s not like the smart kids tried to stick together though. Being in the same classes and ecs all the time does that to you. Most of us absolutely hated each other.

~

nycrolB

I wonder if he has implied or said that he noticed you in high school? There may be non-popularity aspects here? Is he romanticising your attraction/was expecting that you had noticed him and he is now hesitant to admit that he had noticed you in high school? Maybe a sense of destiny / his internal sense of ‘we were meant to be’? It might be too charitable but it might be worth exploring whether this has messed with his internal narrative of your romance being something that could’ve begun before it began?

OOP

At the very least he knew who I was in senior year. I was the first student in like 30 years to get into a certain college and it was all over Snapchat.

A few other students had similar accomplishments. So the school thought it was a great idea to plaster our pictures at the front of the school as well as put it on the school district website for months. My bf joked that he fell in love with me because of the godawful picture they posted. It was literally the ugliest photo I had ever seen, mustache and eye bags on full display.

This was also the school that stapled a list of colleges seniors were going to in their front hallway. Back in the day it would be a cute way to see where your classmates were going but when it became competitive it was basically a mark of shame for kids, which was honestly a shame and quite sad.

OOP Updated the Post - Same Day/Same Post

Update: This is crazy. I didn’t expect so many (wild) replies. It‘s already on tiktok.

I know my bf isn’t a loser still stuck in his glory days in high school so I talked to him and asked why he was upset at me not knowing him in high school. Well, he told me he did have a passing hallway crush on me, mustache, eye bags, and all which was flattering to hear. He felt defensive because I kind of stomped all over his daydreams of fleeting thoughts of each other. He also literally thought I was lying because he knew of me and he thought wrongly that I would know him. I hate being called a liar, which made me go on the warpath. Don’t worry I didn’t tell my friends why I was asking about my bf’s friend group but they’ll probably figure it out.

He apologized and we hugged it out. Honestly these comments were really wild. People were salivating over my bf being this apparent loser jock character. I wasn’t making a statement about anything. My bf and I just ran in different social groups, neither better nor worse than the other (well maybe mine was slightly more toxic).

We had diffeent social experiences, with good and bad points. I can’t believe the number of stereotypes about “nerds” (which I never considered myself lol) or “popular” kids in these comments. I was definitely not taking a social stance by not noticing the popular kids, they weren’t in my radar. I missed way more days of school than my bf for competitions for my clubs. As a boring person, I didn’t have any drama but I witnessed a lot. There were always parties and sneaking around. But there was always this undercurrent of stress that dominated my school life. I don’t regret high school and I’m grateful for the opportunities and experiences but I don’t want to go back. Im not better or worse than my bf because of my high school experience. We’re all just people at the end of the day.

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