That’s the problem with being a romantic

You want there to be romance.

My life has been very short on romance—not just the passionate, “let the world burn itself down” sort, but small, comfortable, sustaining romances.  I was too socially inept as a child to know what romance was, much less to know how to find it.  The few attempts I made foundered almost at once on the rules and conventions of small-town life, which may be one reason I’ve never liked small-town life.

College, once I got there, didn’t hold much romance either.  I began to figure out what romance was, but I wasn’t finding it for myself because I didn’t know where or how to look for it.  (I still don’t, really.)  I stayed wrapped up in my church’s students’ association, and that wasn’t a good place to find romance, the more so because what I wanted at that time was a big, passionate capital-R Romance.  You don’t get many of those in a students’ church group.  There’s a lot of drama, sometimes, but not romance.

The church group was all the social life I had for five years, until I left college.  After that, what social life I had moved into the square dance community for a couple of years until the one truly Romantic thing in my life happened:  I ran off with someone else’s wife.

L was fed up with her first marriage, feeling ground down by her husband’s possessive, domineering personality, and she decided she was having no more of that.  I happened along just as she started to cut herself loose from him and through a series of accidents I ended up falling for her, both emotionally and physically.  It turned out she was very much what I needed in both ways, though I didn’t completely find that out until later.  And I provided things she held important:  encouragement of intellect, lack of emotional possessiveness, and some others.

Within two weeks of L telling me that she was leaving F, and well before they’d even separated, I proposed to her.  I was that afraid of missing out yet again.  Even so I think I was none too soon; another guy in the square dance club had been interested in her, and L said he turned green when she told him she’d taken up with me.

L accepted me right away, though she worded it strangely enough that at first I didn’t realize she’d said “yes.”  She wanted a year to live independently, with her own home and her own bills and responsibilities.  She’d never done that before; she went straight from her parents’ house to a college dorm to living with her first husband, and she said she needed to find out whether she could live independently if she wanted.  So when she answered my proposal with “give me a year,” I thought she meant “give me a year and then ask me again,” not “give me a year and then I’ll marry you.”  I was both surprised and delighted when I found out what she meant.  That happened a little over twenty-three years ago, and we’ve been together since.  I think it qualifies as a romance of some kind.

But after that, there just hasn’t been lots of romance.  For one thing, L isn’t that much of a romantic; she’s far too pragmatic.  Our marriage has been, and is, many good things but it hasn’t really been a great romance.  Romance has a hard time surviving the realities of children and money and jobs.  She’s had other rewarding relationships besides ours, but I don’t believe they’ve ever risen as far as romance, either.  That hasn’t seemed to bother her, or if it has, she hasn’t let on.

Me, though—it bothers me. The two other real chances I’ve had at romance both blew up, each for a different reason.  I’m still very good friends with both women, and I wouldn’t trade for their friendships, but I wanted to find another friend and lover, and that hasn’t happened.

I have no firm idea why it’s never worked for me, although I have a theory or three:  I’m reticent and retiring when I shouldn’t be, I’m too forward when I should go slower, not that many people in the world share L’s and my philosophy about relationships and love (and sex).  So I feel bloody depressed and despairing of ever finding someone else, much as I want.

A thermal seahorse contemplates the whistle of the moiré mass storage.  Fnord.