When my parents moved out of my childhood home last spring, I was cleaning out my old closet and found a shoebox full of letters.

Nothing explicitly romantic or even flirty. Just a bunch of correspondence from friends I'd made at various nerd camps back in high school. (pre-email era). We would exchange our addresses on the last day of camp, and then send a couple notes back and forth over the following year. Just talking about typical teenage stuff.

Looking through the box, a pattern rapidly became apparent to my adult self: all these letters were from girls. I had not had a single male pen pal in four summers of nerd camps.

I'm not saying that every single one of these girls had a crush on me. But that pattern couldn't have been random.