#1 - Name: BarlowBrad (Part 1 of 2)

Hopefully this is the start of some consistent blogging. I'm going to go through my initial "Table of Contents" and attempt to regularly post on them.

I picked up the name BarlowBrad (or BarlowGuy) sometime around the end of high school. Brad is my first name, so that much is obvious, but Barlow is not my last name. Barlow is a reference to the Superchick song "Barlow Girls". I picked up the name because it fit me. These lines in particular:

They don't date, they won't date
They wanna see how they're gonna grow up
Who they're gonna be
...
And yes there are guys who are willing to wait
Ask a Barlow girl on her wedding day

Now let's get this part out of the way right away... I wasn't the most popular kid growing up. In fact, I was the one that the unpopular kids made fun of. So not dating through my freshman year of high school wasn't something that was done much by choice. But I don't know how or why, but girls starting becoming interested in me after that and I had a choice to make. But then, as I looked at my friends who dated, I noticed they all broke up and most of them ended up hating each other. I decided that I didn't want to lose a friend like that.

I also realized that dating relationships tend to go one of two ways, either toward greater intimacy (e.g., marriage and all that goes with it) or away from intimacy. So I wanted to either date the I wanted to marry, or not date at all. Somehow I had the wisdom and foresight to realize that I probably wasn't going to find the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with in high school, so I decided dating in high school wasn't for me.

Eventually, I heard the song and thought, "Hey, they're like me! I suppose I could call myself that too." So I did.