Ancient history

I’m going to tell you the story of how we met, and then something else from a long time ago.

We used to work together at a nonprofit environmental group in NYC. I was more or less second-in-command of IT, having been there for about five years, and she came on board as a fundraising database and operations manager. She had previously been at a few very downtown businesses staffed primarily by punks and metalheads and hadn’t needed to dress for work before, so didn’t have a lot of appropriate clothing. She was wearing a pretty conservative outfit that she felt dumb in because she didn’t really have anything work-nice that wasn’t also boring.

The thing is, it was a skirt and sweater set, and anybody could easily tell how hot she was in it, even if it didn’t suit her personality. At the time I was living with my ex so not free, although I had cheated on her a lot and was in the habit of flirting with and trying to seduce basically every woman I met that I thought was hot. She was married to her first husband and not at all a cheater.

(I should interrupt myself here to say that cheating sucks. We all know it sucks for one cheated upon. But if you’re the cheater, you’re lying to yourself about something, and cheating is probably a way to avoid dealing with that. In my case it was not wanting to be with my ex anymore, but not wanting to admit it. And then continuing in that state for years, when I could have been happier.)

Anyway, I wanted her immediately. And I was wearing my Chris Ware-designed WFMU t-shirt–it was legendary and of course I can’t find any images of it now, but it was awesome, and of course branded me as quite a bit more in-the-know about great music than your average office worker. AND, she was coming out of the music industry (sort of–I can’t say more without saying too much about who we are), so she immediately felt even dumber in her boring outfit. Sorry–you probably can’t hear the smile in my tone–it was not a boring outfit and she shouldn’t have felt dumb. It was her first day. I probably wore a jacket and tie on my first day. The point is, it left her wanting to impress me, which was alright.

I asked her out to lunch, like I did with all the ladies I thought were hot (which I’m not proud of and honestly knew better even then), and she made it clear that no fooling around was going to happen. It’s not like we raised the topic; it’s more that she knew how to body-language her way around, and picking that up, I knew better than to try to push. The thing is, I already thought she was special, and was thinking that we would get together for real at some point. I mean, I didn’t have the measure of self-control to refuse her if she were making herself available, so give her the credit.

We started getting together socially–her husband ad my wife included. It was fun! We all got along. I think we went out twice; in particular I remember going to the barge in Red Hook with them to see Life in a Blender, a semi-legendary alternative pop/rock band that had a lot of great songs; I was friends with the singer (we had met through friends, so I was lucky to know him as a person before hearing the band; and then when we heard the band and loved them, that was fantastic). Later that night we went to Great Lakes on 5th Ave in Park Slope and I was so tired I was falling asleep with my eyes open.

I left that job less than a year after she started. Two months later, I got a mass email she sent to a lot of friends that her husband had left her. Of course I wrote back to say we were there for her, should get together, whatever, and we did, for brunch, I don’t know maybe 2 months later. At Boca Chica, a really cool downtown Brazilian diner/cafe/drinks/dinner spot that did not last much longer, it being the East Village/LES and with all the changes there (this would have been the year 2000). I don’t know that we got together again socially after that, but we must have stayed in touch, probably by email.

Finally, in the fall, my ex moved away to do a post-doc at a prestigious midwestern college, and I reached out to my future wife and we started dating. Here are some things of which I am extremely not proud:

• I waited until my ex was far away before I raised the topic of breaking up. Basically, I was a wimp. I couldn’t tell her while we lived together, so I persisted in an unhappy relationship for longer than I should have.
• I waited until my wife and I had kissed, and I think even fucked, before I told my ex I was breaking up with her.

I also waited until my ex came back to NYC for a visit before I told her and she reacted predictably, completely confused and angry. She told me it would have been better to tell her over the phone, but I’m not sure about that. Maybe telling her in person was the better approach. Best would have been to go out to her and tell her, rather than making her come back and spend a few days in our shared home. This was all a long time ago and I’m a better person now, but it still hurts when I think of how badly I handled the break-up. It wasn’t a great way to start a new relationship, either, to be in the middle of all that pain while getting to know someone new. I wish I could tell a story about how beautiful our coming together was, how we were enraptured with each other, and there absolutely was a lot of that. But now that I’m honest with myself, what I remember most from that period was the pain that came from realizing I had been such a wuss and never honest with my ex, or with myself.

I left that earlier relationship confident that it was the right thing to do; although I’m not in touch with my ex I’m sure she was happier within two years than she would have been with me still lying and cheating. The question that remained, however, is what if I had been honest about my unhappiness years before? Could we have improved things? The answer is no, the end result was the right place for everyone, but I would feel a lot better about myself, and would have been able to enjoy those first few months with my wife more, had I answered that question conclusively before she and I started going out.

I actually started therapy then and continued it for 3 years; that was a big part of me learning to be honest with myself, and that has made my life so much better. I recommend therapy. I did have a great therapist–she was a Cognitive-Behavioral and that worked out well for me. Mostly what she did was just get me to admit to what I really felt about things, and recognize those feelings, instead of papering over them with rationalizations and half-truths that I then came to believe. I doubt that BetterHelp or those other online therapy things would be nearly as good.

By the way, I never delete emails other than marketing junk so I probably have some of our communications from this period. It’s funny to think back that we didn’t have cell phones then. Or maybe I did? But it would have been for work; there was a period of time where I didn’t use the cell phone (which I mostly hated) for personal stuff. But I definitely still had a land line; I switched to Vonage in about 2001, and gave it up a few years later, so I had a traditional phone back then. The reason I raise this is that we must have called each other on regular phones a lot, but I don’t remember that at all.

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I recently updated things that make my wife come so I was thinking about something that actually didn’t make her come. Not long after we started going out, we were out late on 4th Ave in Brooklyn, up in the named streets downslope from the northern reaches of Park Slope. Could be I still lived in Carroll Gardens then (President between Hoyt and Bond) and we were walking home from Great Lakes (bar on 5th ave), or maybe we lived in Sunset Park and we were walking to the Atlantic Ave station to get home. Anyway, at the edge of a McDonald’s parking lot, a neighboring building had a boarded up door with a little stoop. I’m a lot taller than her, so I maneuvered her onto the stoop and started kissing her. It was the hottest kissing ever. I mean we were going nuts. This was really late, I don’t know, probably 2am, so there was nobody around. Not that it mattered. Ever since then, when we see a stoop, there’s a good chance we’ll put her up on it and make out a little.