In the beginning, starting with Book 1, Ivy gives romance and relationships little serious thought. Any time she encounters anything under the umbrella, she fends it off with teasing or incredulous “who, me?” responses. This is most notable with Zeke:

Book 1, chapter 1
I batted my eyelashes and smiled my fake come-on smile. I’d never smiled a real one in my life. My fake one was good enough to drive him up the wall, almost literally. . . . He was, after all, male, and therefore susceptible to well-placed female tortures.

Book 1, chapter 11
Zeke never got the balls to ask me to dance. I wasn’t sure if the idea had really occurred to him. Just for a moment I considered asking him, just to cheer him up. Then I realized how dumb that would be. I didn’t want to lead him on. An invitation like that would most likely have him panting to get in my jeans for the rest of the year.

Book 1, chapter 12
“I don’t know how you could possibly find me sexy. I’m built like a six-year-old.”

Others often pick up on her behavior and assume it means something more than how she means it:

Book 1, chapter 1
“You guys are always teasing and Cecily says boys and girls do stuff like that when they like each other.” (Tab)

“One would think you want him too, the way you go after him.” (Adele)

Book 1, chapter 12
“What, you don’t want her alone with any guy but you?” (Keenan)

“I knew it had to be love.” . . . “Jeez, you guys, you could at least close the door.” (Cecily)

“You two sure have an interesting way of courtship.” (Zoe)

“You know, Ivy, it’s not a crime to be interested in someone.” . . . . “If you two wanted to date, none of us would object! And Cecily would get off your back eventually. You’d be cute together.” (Peyton)

In Book 1, Zeke receives some advice on how to go after Ivy:

Book 1, chapter 12
“C’mon, Zeke, if you like her it’s time to chase her.” . . .
“You gotta learn to be a man if you want to get your woman.” (Cecily)

This leads to his taking her aside and confessing his feelings for her:

“I just wanted you to know . . . this isn’t easy for me to say, but . . . well, you’ve probably figured out by now that I kind of like you.” . . . “See, I think you’re really a nice girl, but sometimes you just freak me out.” . . . “I guess I would like you better if you were just human. I mean . . . I don’t know what I mean.” . . . “It makes me realize every time I see your feet an inch off the floor that you’re not human, and I can’t tell you how weird that makes me feel, like . . . I have a crush on something that’s not even my species.” . . . “I just figured I’d come clean is all. I prefer things being in the open instead of playing stupid little games. Now how about you . . . how do you feel about me?”

Ivy’s reply is classic for this stage of her life:

“I feel the same about you that I feel about all guys, I think you have cooties.” . . . “I just don’t really care about all that romantic stuff, I guess, so I’m sorry to say that I don’t return your feelings.”

Zeke suggests that she doesn’t like him because he’s human, but she puts that to rest too:

“Even if there was someone around who looked and acted like me, I don’t think I’d be attracted to him, really. I don’t think I really even know what ‘attracted’ means.”

This is quite true, as other incidents illustrate in her encounters with boys in Book 1:

Book 1, chapter 5
Random guy in mall: “Uh, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you’re pretty cute to be sitting here all by yourself. . . . ”

Response: She messes with him in a little prank and mentions that she already has a date tonight. Random guy says, “All right, hey, so you’re not my type anyway.” Ivy replies, “I’m crushed.”

Book 1, chapter 9
Random guy on bike: “Well, if you’re not going anywhere, why don’t you come with me to get some ice cream?”
Ivy: “I don’t want any ice cream. But thanks for asking.”
Random guy: “Well, why don’t you just come with me while I get some ice cream, and we can get to know each other?” . . . “I can carry you. It’s no trouble.”
Ivy: “I could carry you easier than you could carry me.”
Random guy: “Your loss.”

Book 1, chapter 11
A couple of times, I went to the bar and got a soda, and both times I got asked to dance by sleazy guys. It surprised the hell out of me. The second time I accepted, just because. . . . I managed to have fun dancing with the sleazy guy, even though I really didn’t know how to dance, until he started to ask personal questions that usually led up to getting cooties. So I got Cecily to pretend to be my lesbian girlfriend. That got rid of him pretty quickly.

The bottom line for Book 1:

Book 1, chapter 11
Cecily and I shared our opinions of Perry’s band. She thought the violinist was cute. He was pleasant enough, but nothing worth getting cooties over. Of course, I didn’t think any guy was worth it. “Cooties” basically summed up my attitude toward the entire concept of sex. I didn’t have thoughts about it that I could remember, but when I knew people were thinking about it with me in mind, my first reaction was “Ew, that’s gross.” People always thought I was weird because of it . . . but then, I was quite used to that.

Now, once Book 2 comes along, Ivy is thrust into the world of humans, pretending to be one of them as she goes to a public high school. There she gets quite a bit of attention; despite her odd looks, some of the guys manage to find her attractively exotic, and her reaction is a bit more complicated than “Hah, that’s funny—no thanks.”

Book 2, chapter 17
Jack: “You’re the girl Thomas was talking about, right?” . . . “Well, he sure wasn’t exaggerating.” . . . “Thomas said you looked like you jumped right out of a Japanese comic. I figured he was stretching the truth a little, but he really wasn’t. He asked if I’d seen you around.” . . . “We were just talkin’ guy stuff, and your name came up.”

Ivy’s response:

It was half pleasing and half disturbing that he had spoken with me. I was seen as close enough to one of them to be viewed as a sex object. It was cool that I was “normal” enough, but sickening that anyone thought of me like that. I’d always found that gross. But it was part of being cute and female, after all.

Her girl friends think she’s a little crazy for not being excited by the attention:

Book 2, chapter 8
Nicky: “You think it’s gross that Thomas has an interest in you? You’re insane.”

Book 2, chapter 11
Nicky: “Adolescent girls are supposed to like guys. You’re just kind of strange if you don’t.”

This attitude continues in Book 3, when the girls do their MASH game:

Book 3, chapter 10
Nicky: “Name two boys you like.”
Ivy: “Huh?”
Nicky: “You name two boys, and we pick the third one. You end up marrying one of them.”
Ivy: “What?”
Andrea: “It’s just a game, Ivy. Play along!”
Ivy: “But what if I don’t know the person I want to marry yet?”
Nicky: “Ivy!”
Ivy: “And what if I don’t want to be married?”
Nicky: “Come on!”
Ivy: “What if I’d rather marry a girl?”

Obviously this is not the case, as Ivy doesn’t want to marry anyone, but in Book 3 one of Ivy’s main issues is how to deal with the issues of romance. In the first book, Zeke came out to her and tried to woo her with an honest confession. It didn’t work. In the second book, Zeke teased her the way she teased him and tried to establish a bond that way, but it only ended up aggravating her and making her threaten to beat him up. By Book 3, Zeke has buckled down and gotten serious, and aims all his intellect and heart at pulling Ivy in.

First he attempts with intimate encounters:

Book 3, chapter 3
“I’ve been known to give a pretty good massage. Want to try me out?”

Though she worries he’s just got ulterior motives, she lets him give her a massage, and enjoys it (for which Weaver teases her mercilessly). This encourages him greatly—especially since she thanks him privately—and he manages to screw up the courage to ask her on a little date:

Book 3, chapter 4
“I just wondered how interested you would be in going on a picnic.”

While on the picnic, Zeke makes his famous first move. He’s kissed her before in Book 1, but she kicked his butt for it, and it was a teasing attempt anyway, he said he was trying to give her cooties. Here we have Zeke going through classic “date” material:

Book 3, chapter 7
“I wanted to do something nice for you, and . . . I thought girls were supposed to like flowers.”

Later he compliments her looks:

“You looked so perfect, sitting there holding a flower, smiling, and your hair catching the sun. . . . ”

She reminds him that he often teases her for looking like a freak, and he admits that when he does that he’s really just talking out of his ass.

“I used to think you looked strange, back when I first met you and stuff, but now I’m used to the way you look, and I really think you look pretty . . . ” . . . “I mean that, I’m not bullshitting you.”

He philosophizes on how he’d feel like less of a loser if he could date someone like her, and when she accuses him of trying to ask her out, he denies it, but with an opening:

“I’d never ask you out. I know you’d turn me down.” . . . “Wouldn’t you?”

When she gives him the inevitable answer, he wants to understand:

“I just want to know why, Ivy. What’s wrong with me?”
“It’s not you, it’s me.” . . . “It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s just that I don’t like guys.”

She goes on to say that if she dated anyone, it’d be misleading, because they’d expect her to want sex and she doesn’t. Zeke corrects her:

“Relationships aren’t all about sex.”

Ivy’s reply:

“But without sex, it’s just a friendship. So why bother dating if you can have friends?”

From there, Zeke insists that parts of romantic activities can be very nice, and that Ivy doesn’t know until she tries it. He baits her, saying she’s afraid, at which point she grabs him and kisses him to prove she isn’t afraid. He claims she doesn’t know how to kiss, and asks for permission to show her a “real” kiss. She grants it, and he does.

“What’re you doing?”
“This is a real kiss. You have to open your mouth a little bit.”

When he asks how she liked it, she analyzes herself:

He’d put his lips against mine. His lips were warm. When he opened his mouth it was wet. I’d thought he could probably taste the mayo on the sandwich I’d had. I knew kissing was supposed to be romantic, so I tried to call up any romantic thoughts I might have had. Had I liked it? It didn’t send shivers down my spine. I didn’t feel any tingling. I didn’t have a head rush. I didn’t feel any sense of affection toward him or what he’d done.

She’s a little shaken by the experience, and he suggests maybe she’s just not the kissing type of girl and tries to show her a little bit of “other stuff.” She feels very alienated by the cuddling and the attempt he makes to move on to the next base, and she stops all the action by getting bewildered and crying about it. They eventually determine that she only feels uncomfortable if he moves toward physical expression of attraction; she’s not afraid to be touched, just not “like that.”

Later in the book, he tries again while engaged in a wrestling match in the rain:

Book 3, chapter 9
I yelped again and waited for him to stop tickling me. When he finally quit and I was breathless with laughter, he just looked down at me with water dripping off of his slick black hair, and then he leaned down and kissed me right on the mouth. It was a wet kiss that tasted like the ocean and reminded me of the rain.

She doesn’t feel compelled to kick his butt for this transgression, though she also claims she didn’t like it. Unfortunately the crew was watching this encounter, and she gets a little hell for it:

Cecily: “Way to go, Ivy.”
Ivy: “What the hell?” . . . “Were you assholes watching us?”
Zoe: “Ivy, that’s a pretty weird place for that stuff, isn’t it? The beach in the middle of a thunderstorm?”
Weaver: “Nice going, Zeke.”
Ivy: “What were you watching for, anyway? Don’t you have something better to do?”
Cecily: “Not really.”
Ivy: “He’s the one who started it.”
Adele: “We all saw you start it, Ivy.”
Ivy: “I did not! I just started the wrestling. He’s the one who kissed me!”
Cecily: “But you didn’t kick his ass for it!”
Ivy: “But . . . but I didn’t like it!”
Weaver: “Ooh, bummer, Zeke.”
Zeke: “Y’all shut up.”

Ivy ends up knocking over the couch they’re all sitting on in retaliation, and then they go clean themselves up. Their “romance” is the talk of the house for a while after that.

Zeke doesn’t let up at all, moving on to a heartfelt discussion of his feelings while sitting on the roof together one day:

Book 3, chapter 10
“When I see you, I would really like to kiss you.”

Her feelings in response are best summed up in her own words:

I wanted to be doing anything but sitting on this roof with him so close to me.

This interaction makes her cry again and then she provides a distraction and an escape. She begins to discuss her difficulties with others, namely Francis Fairchild and Miss Margaret:

Book 3, chapter 14
“I mean, other girls my age are crawling all over the boys, wanting to date them and stuff . . . and I just . . . don’t want to.”

Book 3, chapter 16
“I don’t like him, and I’ve been thinking about why not.” . . . “I just feel like I’m supposed to. I mean, he sure likes me.” . . . “I’ve never liked anybody that way, and I’m thinking it’s about time I did.” . . . “I never feel it, at least, any more than wanting to be friends with someone. It’s like I’m still six years old. Do you think that’s normal?”

Zeke invites Ivy to a Christmas party, and she agrees to attend as long as he promises it’s not “a date.” Unfortunately, when she gets to the party everyone pretty much assumes that she and Zeke are an item, and she is kind enough to avoid embarrassing him by announcing exactly how romantically involved they are not. She has also promised to avoid using her energy at the party, but after some champagne she tries to use it in private and finds it’s not working right. This freaks her out more than anything ever has, and when she gets Zeke alone to help her deal with it, he tries to go on with his premeditated plan of giving her a charming bracelet and getting her to agree to a relationship.

Book 3, chapter 19
“I want you to just try being my girlfriend for a while. You’ve trusted me so far and it’s all turned out good, and it could get better. You know, we could just try it out, and if you don’t like it . . . well. . . . ”

Ivy accuses him of getting her drunk on purpose so that she’ll agree, and she becomes explosively angry. He gets angry back.

“I told you! I can’t be your girlfriend. Zeke, I don’t like people that way!”

He accuses her of being a racist and says she won’t give him a chance because he’s human.

“You’re telling me if I was some kind of flying elf creature you wouldn’t date me?” . . . “It has nothing to do with who I am, it’s what I am. If I could fly you’d go out with me.”

Unable to handle this craziness on top of her problem with her energy, Ivy attempts to get away and passes out on top of his parents’ house. She wakes up in a room she’s destroyed in her sleep. The two have an argument about her motives and his, and they part company still angry at each other. She confides in Miss Margaret, which leads into her fortuitous foiling of a robbery and Margaret’s subsequent sponsoring her on a quest to find her purpose. She and Zeke don’t see each other for a while, and it’s because she’s with Ruben. That spawns a whole second bout with romance difficulty, because Ivy feels like she’s “supposed” to like Ruben. She moves in with him a little tentatively:

Book 3, Chapter 27
He’d invited me to sleep in his big pile of pillows with him, but that was too much for me because when I woke up I felt like I was his wife or something.

Ruben and Ivy go to a fair together and at one point he’s being silly and swinging her around to make her dizzy. Some kids tell them to get a room, and they lead into a discussion of their affection:

“It wasn’t like we were engaged in PDA or anything.”
“What’s PDA?”
“Public display of affection.”
“Well, we weren’t being disgusting, but I guess it was a public display of affection.”
“Huh?”
“I do like you.” . . . “If I like you, isn’t that affection?”

Then they have their famous first flight, during which Ruben hears about her experiences with Zeke and suggests she try kissing others before she makes a “total judgment that kissing sucks.” She agrees to try kissing him:

I drifted closer to him and took his hands, then I looked up at him, trying to see something in his eyes. All I saw was the playful guy I was getting to know, and I didn’t detect any kind of weird half-sleeping hunger that I sometimes saw in guys’ eyes. That encouraged me greatly.

I floated up and kissed his mouth, holding my eyes closed in case there was something I’d rather not see. Nothing really happened, so I opened my mouth just a little bit like Zeke had taught me. When he didn’t do anything, I thought maybe I was supposed to since technically I had initiated it, so even though I really didn’t feel like doing it, I licked his bottom lip. He responded by doing the same thing back, and then I just closed my mouth and gave him a quick peck on the lips again. I pulled back and saw his slightly amused brown eyes, and I wiped off my lips with my hand.

They both decide it wasn’t that great and acknowledge their simple friendship. She’s mostly pleased about the experience, and he admits to her that he has a very low sex drive himself and actually didn’t get interested in a woman for the first time until he was twenty.

Through the next few chapters she grows closer to Ruben as a friend, and her continued interaction with humans is slowly making her hold herself to their standards more often. She becomes frustrated that she doesn’t have romantic feelings for Ruben:

Book 3, chapter 34
“I like you. And I feel like that means I should want to kiss you. So can we try again?”

During their second experimental kiss, Ivy takes inventory of her feelings:

Ruben came close to me and nonchalantly kissed my lips. I closed my eyes and tried to hear an angel choir or see stars or feel something romantic. All that came to me was regular kind of thoughts, none of them related to any kind of romance. I remembered how couples looked in movies when they kissed, and how passionate they sometimes seemed . . . and I felt nothing. I couldn’t even imagine how anyone could think this would feel good. Whatever was supposed to happen to people when they kissed each other didn’t happen to me. There’s something wrong with me. I stepped back from him and wrapped my arms around myself, and my eyes filled up with tears.

Part of the reason Ivy likes Ruben so much is that he can put her feelings into perspective for her so easily. Their conversation makes her feel a lot more settled:

“I don’t understand it. I like you a lot but I don’t like kissing you. What the hell is wrong with me?”
“You don’t have to want to jump my bones to like me. I like you too and I have no desire to get into your pants.”
“I wish just one thing about me could be normal.”
“Ya know, having no sex drive makes things a lot less complicated.”
“But relationships and kissing and all that are things humans do.”
“Listen to me, Ivy. Do you want to be human? Or do you want to be happy?”
“Uh . . . happy, I guess. . . . ”
“Then be happy.”

Eventually, when Ivy comes back to the house, she reconciles with Zeke, who’s been thinking:

Book 3, chapter 28
“I been thinking.” . . . “Thinking about us. And what happened.”

Zeke asks Ivy if she wants the bracelet back, and explains his reasoning:

“I originally got it because I thought you would see how much I liked you, for getting something so expensive . . . and I thought maybe my displays of my care would . . . melt you a little.” . . . “I realized I still want you as a friend, I want you in my life no matter what we do together. You still mean just as much to me without being my girlfriend as you would if you had agreed. So I guess the bracelet belongs to you after all.”

He finally sums it up in this conclusion:

“I just decided we’re probably not right for each other. We’re too different.”

He goes on to say that he wants someone who thinks on his level and someone who doesn’t practically come from a different reality. It makes Ivy feel odd to think Zeke won’t be chasing her anymore:

I felt a little sad, because ever since I’d known Zeke, the chasing me had been part of who he was to me, and now that was changing. I almost felt like I had lost something. But I really did want him to move on, and to find happiness for himself, and to stop attacking me with his romantic crap. I couldn’t deny that I felt a little hollow, though. It was strange. I hadn’t liked him wanting me, but now that he said he really didn’t, I felt less special. I’d liked being desired, even though the active desire had annoyed me.

Zeke finally says that he isn’t sure he ever loved her, but that she probably is in the place in his heart a guy reserves for his first love. It’s all very sweet. It doesn’t stop Zeke from throwing out the occasional jealous remark from then on, though; in response to Ivy “shacking up” with Ruben, he says the following:

Book 3, chapter 35
“You two have something going on, don’t you? You just don’t want to hurt my feelings. Go on, I can take it.”

Book 4 has very little in the way of romantic encounters. Living with Ruben makes Ivy act and feel very much like his wife, and she likes having a partnership like that, but there is no romance and they’ve both accepted it (though others think they see evidence to the contrary). Ivy does become jealous when “her” Ruben’s attention is claimed by someone else:

Book 4, Chapter 29
“Will you shut up about Jesse?” . . . “I get the idea, he’s the coolest person in the world, a lot cooler than I’ll ever be, okay? You can rub it in but just let me know next time so I can put the phone down while you run up long distance bills broadcasting the Jesse Show!”

He sets her straight pretty solidly:

“You need to remember that you can’t be replaced, not by anybody. But you also can’t expect to stay the primary influence on my daily life when you’re not even here.”

In Book 5, Ivy meets Todd. She doesn’t intend to get romantically involved with him, but sometimes it seems like he thinks they’re dating. She sets him straight in a conversation in a restaurant on their second “date,” but he still seems to think there’s hope:

Book 5, chapter 3
“So you just want to take it slow, is that it?”
“Take what slow?”
“Well, er . . . dating, I guess.”
“Dating? You mean us?”
“You asked me to lunch.” . . . “You asked for my number, you aren’t involved with anyone, what else could we be doing?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, like, lead you on. I don’t want to date, I just want to be friends.”
“Oh.” . . . “You have a funny way of showing it.”
“I’m not very aware of this stuff. I wasn’t raised here, sometimes I still give people messages when I have no idea I am.”
“So . . . friends then.”
“Yeah . . . okay?”
“More than okay. And if stuff changes, we’ll change with it. Cool?”
“Yeah, that’s okay.”

Ivy is later entranced by Todd’s acceptance of her, and feels like if she drops the bomb about her secrets then he will desert her. She can’t deny that she has feelings for him, but she still doesn’t seem to be able to stir up a hint of romance. She’s almost confused that he finds this all right, and continually looks for proof that he’s just trying to get in her pants. He has to set her straight:

Book 5, chapter 8
“I like you and I think you’re just gorgeous, and I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t want you as a girlfriend. But I’m also being honest when I say if this never goes anywhere beyond friendship, that’s of value to me too. I like who you are, whether you’re a girl package for me or not.”

When the two of them climb a mountain, she has some interesting feelings regarding being impressed by his strength, but it still doesn’t qualify as romantic:

Book 5, chapter 13
“I think it’d be easier if I had big muscles,” I argued, flexing my arms. He laughed and flexed his too. I felt funny when I looked at his arms. It was like I had a sudden sense of awe about how strong he must be. I watched him shake off his fatigue and pour a small amount of water into his hands, then splash it on his hair. His chest was wet from the sweat and I could see he had big muscles there too. It was odd; I didn’t feel any kind of attraction to him, but more of an intense interest. He was foreign to me, so different from what I was. There was something primal about him, something very natural, like he was an extension of the land and knew exactly what to do with his body to tame the world.

There is going to be a little more in the realm with the Todd story line (and the rest isn’t yet written), but nothing too drastic. Beyond this, there’s still nothing on the horizon for Ivy as far as actual romance goes; all of her experiences in this ballpark are involved with exploring her feelings about not feeling—and how deeply she can love in non-romantic ways despite that.