This dratted schoenberg song is still chanting in my head, so I’m telling the story again.
I met the woman who perhaps should have become my wife—my first wife—at a client’s site back in the early 1990s; I suspect 1993. I was in my mid–30s, she was a little younger.
We had an intense chemistry, the strongest I’ve ever felt. I knew, with that chemistry, that, had we got together, we would have found it extremely difficult to split. We’d almost certainly have been together forever, or as much of forever as life allows.
I’d had a few relationships beforehand, but, to be honest, relationships are not, were not, and never have been, one of my life skills. Although I can do the people thing, I can only do so much of it. That, though, is not the real problem. There was, and is, something about me that, once a girlfriend found out, she split. I couldn’t, and didn’t, blame the women; if anything, I blamed evolution. What was it? Let’s put it this way, I am rather fond of a jolly good munch. I do not have to self–censor there. I am a wielder at munch parties. To put it bluntly, I am straight, but I am not vanilla, as regretfully a few disappointed young ladies found out when I was experimenting in my 20s.
Anyway, because the chemistry was so intense with woman X, I knew I had no choice but to tell her about that animal thing before we considered getting together. I wanted her to choose beforehand, to avoid that chemistry trap should she dislike my nasty nature, as most would. Anything but giving her that choice, while she could make the choice, would have been deeply unethical. Thus she had to know before we started dating, presuming, because that chemistry was just too damn strong, because I felt, should we started dating, there was a pretty good chance we wouldn’t have been able to stop.
Now, I understand that chemistry is the body’s way of saying a potential partner has a compatible immune system for making babies who are more likely to survive into adulthood. Initial chemistry is scent based, so far as I know, but the body can make a much better assessment by exchanging body fluids, e.g. from kissing. Had we kissed, we’d have either lost interest, or, far more likely given the early intensity of it, felt the chemistry redouble. As it was, the chemistry was strong, and, had it redoubled, I had little doubt we would have been sewn together forever. So far as I was concerned, I had absolutely no choice but to make sure she knew about my nasty nature before I so much as touched her. She had to have a genuine choice.
But how and where? My munchness is not socially popular. It’s the kind of thing that can make people recoil. Hence it is deeply private and personal to me. I do not tell willy–nilly, I do not tell here. To make sure she knew, I wanted to tell her somewhere where there was no chance of anyone else who knew me, even vaguely, overhearing. Secondly, I wanted somewhere where there was no kind of pressure, even at the mildest level, on her to hang around: I wanted her to be able to walk out on the spot if that’s how she felt. I expected her to do that, to be honest. It was essential to me that, had we got together, she was fully informed, that she consented to becoming one half of us.
This meant a meal was out, because there’s an expectation to finish eating, to pay afterwards. That ruled out such things as films and plays. That ruled out anywhere where she might have felt unsafe if unaccompanied. That ruled out anywhere private, anywhere isolated. In the end, I felt a pub was best, one some distance away, because people can just walk out, and often do. Someone can simply pick up their drink and move to another table. That’s not possible at a restaurant.
Anyway, she always refused. After a little while, I made sure she knew I needed to tell her something, but she still didn’t get it, or at least she didn’t get my need for discretion. She didn’t read the room. She never let me tell her. I didn’t get that then, and I still don’t.
I tried so many times, and was always, always, refused. Eventually, the pressure grew too much: I came to the end of my tether, seriously to the end of it. Now, I’d read her as wanting something like a more formal date, so, as a final desperate attempt to get us to connect, and, despite the ethics and principles of making sure she knew my nature first, I offered to take her out for a meal. I was so fed up that I did so by email. Her response? Not the no I expected. Not the yes I’d have been shocked but delighted to receive. Not questions. No, her response was zero, rien, nowt, zilch, nothing: her response was no reply, her response was a snub.
That was it. I could take no more. I had to get out, to get away, find an elsewhere, a calm another. We clearly couldn’t communicate. I concluded we some kind of potential conflict, an inability to communicate, a nascent personality clash, which have been an utter disaster had we been glued together by that chemistry.
I cancelled my work contract, or maybe I refused to renew, I forget. I never went back to that client. I didn’t tell them the real reason why I quit, I did not want any risk of them doing something negative to her—after all, our situation had nothing to do with her professional life.
A few years later, I was invited to a reunion, and, for once, went along. She was there, the chemistry was there. We had a brief conversation. She told me that I should have been her husband, with which I now agree. She also told me that it was my fault that we weren’t together. Obviously, I disagreed with that, but, more to the point, I disliked her blame game. She didn’t want a solution, she wanted a criminal. This very much fitted with my belief that we had a nascent personality clash. I seem to remember I politely said goodbye, & walked away: walked away forever.
I’ve not been back to another reunion, presuming there were more.
So why has these events returned to mind? I spent the first couple of months this year reconnecting with old friends from that period of my life. I also, much to my surprise, found myself flirting with a rather attractive younger woman, who was working at a conference I attended. I walked past her a number of times. I made sure she knew I was attached and unavailable. But there was something about that flirting, which continued anyway, which seems to have brought back those earlier memories.
There’s also a regret. Had we two got together, had she taken my warning in hand and decided to continue anyway, we’d almost certainly be parents. I think she was the only person I ever met with whom that would have been a probability. I do not have children. I would like to have had children. As you can see, I regret the way things turned out. But, I made the correct decision at the time, to walk way. It is still the correct decision. Life can give you hard choices, and, sometimes, you have to take the hardest one.
Did she find someone else? I hope so. Did she have a family? I hope she got what she sought. But I’ll never know.