Teach Me

Perhaps for the desire to maintain my sanity, I have decided that for each ineligible bachelor I meet, I am supposed to learn something. 

After all, my brothers met and wed the first girls, whereas my sister and myself had to slog through the mire of dating possibilities. My brothers, perhaps, were not meant to achieve inspiration via that conduit.

While I do not date with stupendous regularity, I am beginning to notice patterns and categories. The "Immature Jackass," the "Nerd with No Upside," the "He's Nice But Not for Me." 

Sometimes there will be a few curveballs. The ones I have problems labeling, which makes things . . . interesting. I try to gauge if this "Original" is for me. I certainly overanalyze in general; this sort of debate ties up my cerebral cortex for days . . . until he is no longer an "Original," and gets boxed in the appropriate category of "What Was I Thinking?" 

Elisabeth Fairfield Stokes discusses a long distant romance. How it almost was, how it fell apart, then met the man she married. 

Sixteen years passed. I finished a graduate degree in something else, married the man who seemed unfazed, amused, even, by what seemed to be my inability to get out of my own way. We moved for his job, bought a house, I began teaching, we had children. I was at times suspicious of happiness and stability; I’d lie awake, listening to our girls breathe, feeling the steady rise and fall of my husband’s body next to mine, my own breath coming too quickly, as if I’d narrowly escaped a fate that was unclear but terrifying. Scenarios of other people I could be with, other lives I could be living, played themselves out in my sleeplessness, searing near misses. But I was safe.

And then he, that long-ago, coffee-shop boyfriend, called my name across a beach last spring. I turned, searching, my younger daughter on my hip; I recognized his voice. I was nervous, making my way across the sand, talking with him, standing next to him again. He was a place holder for a time in my life, a part of myself, that I didn’t understand.

He was always handsome, and when, in parting, I said softly, “You look the same,” and he said, “I know,” I saw instantly that it hadn’t been any more complicated than that he was kind of a jerk, I was kind of a freak, we had both been pretty immature, and that was all it was, all it needed to be. The punitive “What was I thinking?” became the much more compassionate “What was I learning?” And the answer was: everything. I was learning everything about what I wanted in a husband, a marriage, a life.

I have those moments of when I feel cheated, that I "wasted" time, effort, and makeup on a guy that came to nothing, followed by frantic relief that I managed to finagle myself out of a potentially problematic situation. As Elisabeth said, it's not so complicated. 

We are all staggering about aimlessly and calling it tactical navigation; we should never fool ourselves into thinking that we can control and know everything. From the moment we are born we learn; we should learn until we die.

A failed romance does not throw suspicion on our mental abilities. People like to say as singles get older they get pickier; it's not that. We are learning. We know ourselves better, we know what suits us better, we know what will complete us. 

To some extent. Because there is still a lot we all have to learn.