I am ashamed. A woman showed interest in me, and I froze. There was chemistry, in fact pretty strong chemistry. But I did not respond. I should have told her I’m attached and unavailable, so she wasn’t left on the hook, but I did not respond. I never respond. It’s the same reaction that I always have. I turned up at some of the places I knew she would be, from time to time, and the chemistry was there. But I did not respond. I left the poor woman on a hook. This was extremely nasty of me. I feel ashamed of myself. I do not want to find myself doing the same again.
I am going to make the effort to sort this part of myself out, finally.
But to understand what’s going on, so I can address it, I need to go over quite a lot of my history. This, dear imaginary reader, is a confessional. Honestly, this is going to be stunningly boring for most.
I started off with some stark (to me) emotional issues, which I had mostly addressed by the time I got into my late 30s. As Philip Larkin said (in This Be The Verse):
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
My dad had the misfortune to die when I was pretty much the wrong age (hence my considerable sympathy for a certain pair of princes). Life can be a bastard, and it was to him by killing him off in his early 40s, and didn’t do me many favours by giving me a shed load of grief before I could handle it, denying me my father, his advice, his experience: his parenting. This is a dominant theme of my late 20s / early 30s poetry.
But my mum made her own contributions, too, and those I never properly addressed.
But before I come on to that, let me give you a little of my background. My father was quite successful. He wanted his sons to go to Bedford School, a public school, & left my mother enough to pay for public school education for all three of us kids. My mum fulfilled his wishes. Bedford School was then a single‐sex all‐boys school. It still is, although there was a period when it admitted girls.
My mother regularly reminded me that being sent to this school was a great privilege and a great opportunity, and she was right.
One quite normal disadvantage of the school was that I was extremely shy of girls, and had no experience with them, at school or at home. Of course, that’s not true: a sister is, after all, a girl, but I had virtually no experience outside of family members. So girls were a strange exotic unicorn–like fantasy creature, as oppose to ordinary people like my friends and enemies (it’s strange how family doesn’t count).
(I remember a classic event, classic in that most people will have had similar experiences. I was a passenger in the family car, I think mum was driving us to our various schools. I caught the eye of a girl in the back seat of another car going the same direction: I suspect we were stopped at a set of lights. Her eyes got me, and the chemistry flared. Of course, after a few minutes, the cars moved, and I never saw her again.)
I lived in a small village a few miles from my school, so I didn’t socialise in the town, where I might have met some girls and eventually worked out they were people too, with all the usual flawed people foibles. There was, however, a girl in the village who took a fancy to me. As I remember it, it wasn’t mutual; she was indeed attractive, but there was no chemistry.
This is where my mother really fucked up, because she told me that if anything happened between me and that girl, mum would take me out of Bedford School and send me to local crap school instead. I would lose something I valued immensely. Mum simply did not believe me when I pointed out I wasn’t interested in the girl, instead she kept cornering me and threatening me. This taught me:
- that having a girl interested in me was a dangerous thing and risked me losing all that I held valuable, no matter how I felt;
- and, as I realised later, she was a dreadful class bigot (this girl was working class, we were middle class). Thank Gordon Bennett I didn’t inherit that particular cowardice.
My mum apologised later in her life for that, but, of course, by then it was too late.
So I was left feeling immensely shy of women, & unconsciously believing that if a woman showed any interest in me then I would risk losing all that I valued. It’s hardly surprising to me now that it took two decades before I was able to enter into any kind of serious relationship, and that was with a cat. It took me another twenty years before I met the woman whom is now my partner.
Even now, I’m completely hopeless at recognising a situation when a woman is interested in me, and even more hopeless at handling it. I freeze emotionally, and can’t get beyond my arctic reaction. I do feel rather guilty, actually, that instead of giving a decent immediate response of “sorry I’m attached”, so they at least know, I just don’t react, even with serious chemistry. I just don’t like that about me.
Enough, back to a little history. After school, I ended up at Thames Polytechnic in Woolwich, after a year’s diversion at the University of Wales in Bangor. Actually, I should admit now that, despite my ego assuring me otherwise, I was pretty shite academically: I repeated a year at school, and I failed my first–year exams at Bangor. Woolwich worked, though.
As a student I was completely hopeless at recognising come–ons. I’m not talking about not spotting subtle hints, I’m talking about not seeing a barn door at half a pace. If I took any initiative myself, it never worked. So I held back.
(Why did I hold back? First of all, I knew my sexuality was dangerous: if I let myself flow and the girl wasn’t interested, and I didn’t pick that up, I could do her immense harm. So I kept myself on a leash. Secondly, of course, as a guy, I couldn’t read body language: for men it’s a learnt thing, and I hadn’t learnt it. Thirdly, I deeply lacked self–confidence, despite my schooling. Fourthly, like all guys I had to pretend I was brilliant at romance, etc.—letting out even the slightest hint of the absence of aggressive perfection would mess things up badly, so I never spoke about anything romance with friends (had I read Ovid then …). So, basically, I didn’t play.)
(I was cursed by unrequited love a number of times. It is a truly horrible experience. The pain this emotion caused was only once surpassed, by that of the death of my mother. I can understand why it evolved, but were it my decision, and were the technology available, I would excise the curse of the genes that cause this horrible experience from humanity. One of the benefits of aging is that the damn experience rarely fires up, so, in this respect, there is far less suffering amongst the old. This taught me that being interested in a girl was very unpleasant.)
Occasionally, I would find someone attractive in a situation where there was no hassle, and I might ask her if she’d like to spend some time with me. However, one of my rules was not to be a pest, so if she said no, as they all did (during my student days), I wouldn’t ask again. Since the social rules there & then were that a guy had to ask a girl at least three times before she’d consider him, even if a girl was interested she’d say no, so I always got the no. After a while, I gave up asking.
(Ironically, one the reason why things worked with my current partner is the first time I asked her if she’d like to spend some time with me, she said yes. This is the great benefit of moving between cultures: rules change, including the rule that requires a girl who’s interested to lie and say no when first asked. That is, of course, utterly unfair; people keep their shields up when unexpectedly asked something personal.)
(I know this no thing the hard way. I lived for a couple of years in Dublin, where it is perfectly normal for a girl to ask a guy out. It happened to me a couple of times, and I was so surprised that I said no automatically, and regretted it a couple of days later when I realised what had happened. An initial no is hardly surprising.)
I do remember a couple of incidents where student me walked into the barn door and didn’t realise:
- A girl straight out asks me if I would like to have sex with her. I said no, without actually understanding what she’d asked until the next day.
- A girl comes into my room in the halls of residence, sits on my bed, and tells me I can do whatever I like to her. Consciously, I didn’t get it. Unconsciously, I bloody obviously did, because I started stammering like a pneumatic drill. Nothing happened.
- A couple of girls grab me, and take me to the room of their friend. That friend, the most beautiful girl in the college at the time (I’m not just saying that, she really was), tells me that I have to ask a girl three times before she’ll consider going out with me. She tells me to practise on her. Now, I hate the idea of being a pest, and I even more dislike my nasty sexuality, so I wasn’t going to do that. I asked her once, she said no, and I said oh, ok. She got me to go through the process again, with the same result. That happened five times, before I drew a line under the situation (and she was obviously getting annoyed). I didn’t understand what she was up to, I really didn’t. I worked it out a few years later. I really am useless at spotting romantic opportunities.
I did go to bed with a couple of women in my thirties. I was less than useless. I had no clue what to do, beyond the gross obvious, at which I failed. Imagine getting the ingredients for a recipe, putting them in a bowl, and expecting a cake to appear by itself: that was me. I’m still useless in bed, unfortunately for my partner. Unsurprisingly, those women I met in my thirties immediately moved on.
I really am useless as spotting romantic hints, even if I write them! The very first poem that I read at a poetry event, a poem I still think is pretty ok, is Fenland Sketch:
Ploughing deep furrows in the black wet earth yields mummified branches of ancient trees. Rivers run straight as the mythical career of heroes; old roads meander like comfortable lives. No hills, nothing for houses to nestle in, your every deed is seen by your neighbours’ God. This stark grandeur challenges even self–deception; you glare back at the emptiness, or you run.
Look at those first two lines? I wrote them literally. The audience heard another meaning when I read it out (at CB1, in Cambridge, a few years before the turn of the millennium), but it took me another ten years to understand their reaction. I just didn’t see the underlying sexual meaning. I mean, it’s blatantly obvious to most, but not to me then.
Anyway, why I am writing this now? The interest, to my great surprise, continues; my reaction, or lack of it, continues. I have to admit I don’t get why me, a man in his sixties, still gets opportunities offered by young women. Ok, my idea of young women has changed since I was a student, but the opportunities appear from time to time. I’m attached. I should at least tell the poor woman why I can’t respond, rather than playing the arctic fish. I’ve decided, finally, I must do that. It’ll take me some effort, including the slight detail of spotting what’s happening (but nowadays I usually get it, so long as things are repeated a few times), but I really must deal with my own failures rather than hurting someone else. I really must. If a woman has the decency to show an interest in me, I should respect that. I should treat her fairly and honestly by helping her move on. I must stop doing my arctic impression.
And, yes, I realise that some women, when told that a guy is attached and unavailable, intensify their endeavour. But I’d have done my bit; not the arctic fish stuff, but the communication. How she handles it is her choice, but at least she’ll have the choice.
Incidentaly, the photographs are the same feelings, 10 years ago. Also, this kind of thing is a natural for poetry, but this isn’t poetry. Well, not quite. Reread the first paragraph.