Where Is Your Prom Date Now?

It’s the time of year when your choice of prom date will determine the ENTIRE FOUNDATION of your life to come.

Not really, but it’s verrry interesting to see where people’s prom dates are a few years down the road. Will your arm candy turn out to be a rich and famous biochemist, or a Broadway superfan? In ten years time, will you be married to them, or will you have blocked them on social?

Here’s what happened to ten prom dates over the course of ten years…

I asked my friend Dominick to prom after being rejected by two other boys. Dominick had transferred to my high school, a Massachusetts boarding school, in 11th grade. He was from Southern California and introduced me to bands that were obscure and cool, managed to bring up Karl Marx in what I thought were totally mundane conversations, and loved Nabokov. He was an intellectual, an outsider, what I’d later call a “hipster.”

He wore a pair of black Converse with his tux to prom. He knew it wasn’t a “date,” and we went our separate ways for much of the evening, but on the bus ride back to campus, we shared earbuds as he DJ’d on his iPod, playing slow, melancholy, it’s-almost-midnight songs as I pretended to fall asleep on his shoulder—and it was almost romantic. He lives in New York now and I saw him a lot when I lived there. We’re still friends. Not the best of friends. But friends. Old friends. —Emma W.

In high school, I had a habit—great in retrospect, as it led to some amazing friendships, but unfortunate at the time, as it led to some disappointing smooches—of falling in love with gay guys. Like, 6-on-the-Kinsey-Scale gay guys. One of these guys took me to prom my junior year. We went as friends (he’d already come out at this point), and had a blast. Today, my erstwhile date runs a theater company in Chicago and tags a lot of attractive C-list celebrities (like this guy!) and Broadway stars in his Instagram posts. Seems like they sometimes respond! —Jessie

My prom date’s name was Matt.* I asked him to prom—I had to, I went to an all-girls high school, so there was no chance of anyone asking me. Plus, Matt was my best friend in junior and senior years. We both liked each other, but it took us a year before we admitted it to each other, and then there were all these complicated problems that kept us apart. Our fathers were friends and he lived an hour away, so we hardly ever got to see each other, but we wrote emails and called each other all the time.

When prom rolled around, we hadn’t yet told each other about our feelings, and to be honest I was still really confused about how I felt. So I asked him casually and made an excuse to protect my feelings, saying that because I went to a girls school, it was pretty much social suicide if you showed up date-less, and promising him that we would have fun awkwardly dancing to our favorite songs and catching up the way we would once every other week anyway. He said yes right away.

Because we approached it so casually, there was no pressure to get the perfect dress or feel magical or anything. We just took pictures, danced to our favorite songs—some that we had introduced each other to—and drank punch and ate snacks. I loved introducing him to my friends, who had all heard about him but never met him because he lived so far away.

That was five years ago. I honestly don’t know where he is anymore, I moved away for college and we deleted each other off of social media because of what happened in the months after prom. But that’s a story for another day, and our prom picture is still in a box of keepsakes I have in my desk, and every few years, if I am moving apartments or cleaning, I take it out and look at it again. In those pictures we were happy, and unaware of what would happen to us, and I’m grateful for the good memories. —Ally M.

My date for junior prom started out as a friend but ended up becoming my first real boyfriend. It was my first year at a new school, and I didn’t know anyone well enough to go with them yet. “J” had been my neighbor growing up and had just started college, so I thought it’d be pretty cool to bring him to the dance. I didn’t expect the date to blossom into a full-blown summer romance, but that’s what happened! He ended up accompanying me to my senior prom as well, but it was more than just a friendly date by then. We eventually broke up in college and don’t talk anymore, but, hey, it was fun while it lasted. —Amanda Bell

I had the pleasure of going to prom with the funniest, cleverest, sharpest looking person I knew at the time: myself. I looked amazing in a black velvet dress, picked myself up exactly on time, and did not engage in the groping or underage drinking that marred so many of my friends’ prom experiences. Since prom, myself and I have done a good job of keeping in touch, and even though our relationship went through a brief rough patch, we are now on excellent terms again. 10/10, would shake it like a polaroid picture again. —Elaine Atwell

I asked my date to prom by making an extra credit video for AP Bio that ended with “WILL YOU GO TO PROM WITH ME YOU BETTER SAY YES OR I WILL SLAP YOU.” As it turned out, he had left early for Spring Break and wasn’t even in class that day. I also did not get any extra credit. BUT, he agreed to go with me a few days later, and we had a great time dancingly awkwardly in each other’s general vicinity,. He gave me a box of chocolates (the FANCY kind) as a thank you for asking him, and later went on to be Valedictorian of our high school, graduate from MIT, and become CEO of a company that makes magic vaccines that literally SAVE LIVES. Perhaps most notably, he earned the distinction of being “friended” by my dad on Facebook, which was surely the high point of his young life (and definitely a low in mine). —Chelsea

My limo group was tardy to the party and we arrived with one hour left to spare. The rush to pack a full night’s prom experience into sixty minutes, combined with a ~terrible~ oversight on my part, made prom a blur of purple and pink hues meshed with random faces and pretty flower-coated columns. I had left my contacts at home in a rush, and figured temporary blindness would better fit my attempt at elegance than my blocky specs. With my purse in one hand and my glasses in the other, I blindly danced the remainder of night away with my prom date-slash-current best friend by my side.

He is still my best friend, and literally works a block away from where I do, and lives even closer. He threw me a surprise birthday party last year and is pretty much the ying to my yang. —Bianca

There was no prom at the private Jewish high school in Memphis, Tennessee that I attended. There was an annual steak dinner fundraiser that we would “ask” the girls to as dates (the schools were separated by gender), but the school administrators got mad once they figured it out. That being the case, my first prom experience was actually when I was in my sophomore year of college.

If that sounds creepy, let me explain: I met my girlfriend through a Jewish youth group when I was still in high school, but she was behind me. So when it came time for her senior prom, I planned to fly in to Chicago from New York to attend. To make this happen (flight + tux + limo + tickets) I got a job buying back textbooks from other students. It mostly involved sneaking around RAs who didn’t want students working for outside businesses wandering their halls and lugging suitcases filled with very heavy textbooks. On the bright side, I got a cool portable scan gun to use to figure out how much each textbook was worth.

That was a few years ago, and my prom date and I often still speak to each other multiple times a day—because we are still together and share an apartment. (I know, we are too cute.) Score one for true love! —Andrew Tavin

I attended the senior prom with my best friend Michelle. We were the perfect match: She had recently broken up with her boyfriend, and I was desperately head over heels in love with her.

I didn’t just show up on Michelle’s doorstep with a corsage like some rank amateur, oh no. I showed up with a corsage, a mixed CD titled “Thinking Happy Thoughts of You” (because her favorite movie was Peter Pan), and a movie poster of the atrocious 2000 film Whatever it Takes, since that movie was the source of an inside joke between us. If you’re thinking, “Oof, this is not going to end well.” Congratulations!

Michelle was nothing but kind when she eventually shattered my heart to smithereens. Throughout the years, we stayed in touch, and a few months ago, she randomly sent me a text thanking me for my gifts. “I didn’t realize at the time,” the text said, “how sweet of a gesture it really was.” I thought Michelle was married, but perhaps Cupid was just a decade late with his arrow?

Nope!

“My husband thinks it was adorable,” her next text read. —Josh Sorokach

“I asked a guy from my regional ski team to my “formal” because I knew I had about a 5% chance of getting asked my someone at my school (I was right!). He was so nice about it, and got a cute suit, and I picked him up in my dad’s four-wheel drive and gave him a boutonnière, because the theme of the night was emasculating the nice boy who agreed to escort awkward grade-twelve me to the dance (this is exactly why no one would ask me!). After school, he got heavily into theatre, and studied overseas, was in some British sketch show, and now he has his own theater company, although I think he is the only person in the company.

I’m still so grateful to him for saving me from being the only person who went stag to prom, and being so good-natured about the whole thing at a time when I was maxxing out on embarrassment in life.” —Janet

Did you already go to prom? Where is your prom date now?