True love. It’s not just for the Princess Bride. It turns out it’s for me as well.
This came as a big surprise to me. Growing up, I’d never had much of a clue about romance, and although I had a lot of female friends (and still do), I reached the age of 30 without ever having had a girlfriend.
Why am I talking about this now? Largely because one of my readers, who’s turning 30 soon and has never had a girlfriend, emailed me for advice (or really, for encouragement – he knew what action to take already).
That reminded me that I’d never told the story here of how it is that I come to be happily married, when for most of my life I thought that was never going to happen. I think it’s a good story – and maybe it’ll be inspirational, not only if you’re long-term single but if you struggle with any elusive dream.
Meant for someone else and not for me
Let’s start at the beginning. I have a mild form of a genetic condition called Marfan’s syndrome, the main visible signs of which in my case are that I’m very thin, with a noticeably distorted back. I was always self-conscious about my appearance, plus I wasn’t comfortable with emotions. (My family are very emotionally reserved, even for New Zealanders.)
All this meant that I was shy around girls-as-girls (girls as people I was mostly fine with), and asking one out was an impossibly scary thing. I was also very nerdy and unconventional, which didn’t help. I had a strange hyaena-like laugh, deliberately dressed unfashionably, and since my intelligence was the one thing about myself that I did feel confident about, I displayed it at every opportunity. Power tip: This isn’t an endearing trait.
I didn’t have a girlfriend at school, but that was normal in a way, because nor did my two great friends. As it turned out, one of them was gay; the other was just as big a nerd as I was. Once he and I got to university, though, he got a more fashionable haircut, started to dress in jeans and satin shirts (it was the 80s), lost the horn-rimmed glasses (his sight recovered when we were in our late teens), and eventually started dating. I didn’t.
I was very religious at the time, and at least some of the time I rationalised my singleness as a “calling”. Trouble was, I didn’t actually want to be single, deep down, and that led to several years of emotional struggle and internal conflict that didn’t really need to happen.
When I needed sunshine I got rain
And then I created a couple more years of unnecessary pain for myself by falling for a fellow student who only wanted to be friends, not saying anything to her for months, and not taking “no” as her final answer (as I recall, she wasn’t as direct and unambiguous as she could have been, but still).
The two of us then joined the staff of a voluntary organisation that we’d both been involved with at university and went off to Australia to train together, living in the same house. This organisation, incidentally, had a policy that if you were on their staff and wanted to get married, your spouse also had to be on staff already or join, and you can imagine how that distorted things.
I wasn’t over her, but didn’t say anything for more months, by which time I was severely stressed by other things that were happening in my life (like training for an occupation I was completely unsuited for), and I took her second and more definite “no” very hard. I then had to continue to see her almost daily for a few more months, until I left the organisation when it clearly wasn’t going to work out.
Back home, we ended up at the same church. She started going out with one of the other guys from the course – the three of us had been good friends and hung out a lot – and they eventually got married. Still very emotionally vulnerable from severe stress breakdown, I didn’t cope with that well. (I actually turned and fled once when I saw her walking towards me.)
Round and round in little unhappy circles
So that experience overshadowed my romantic life, or lack thereof, for a few years afterwards. It didn’t help that my next serious attempt to start a relationship, with another friend, also got a “no” response. I did go out with a woman for about six months, but “go out” was all we did, and at the end she “clarified” that it had always been on the basis of being just friends – definitely not the impression I had, or the impression that the mutual friend who introduced us had had either. Either I moved too slowly and she lost interest, or her clarification was actually the truth.
There were a couple of times that women did show interest in me. One invited me to a film at the film festival – Blade Runner, which I had watched before and not enjoyed – and it took me a second after I’d said “no” to realise that she’d asked me out. After another second’s review, I decided that my answer stood, though. She was – well, to be honest, she was kind of a female me, and I didn’t find her attractive. (This was back before nerd girls were confident and sexy.)
And then there was the friend of a friend who came on so strong and so desperate that I got horribly nervous, and had to visit the bathroom four or five times during our dinner date at my favourite restaurant. We didn’t go out a second time.
And so I reached 30, having had a total of one date that both people present had definitely considered a date, and it had been – kind of a train crash.
I take action at last
Towards the end of the year I turned 30, though, two things happened that created a shift. The first was something I did. I was aware that I wasn’t good at expressing emotions, though I certainly felt them powerfully enough (my years of romantic hope and disappointment had shown me that – several of those many rejections, even some that were indirect and happened before I’d even asked, had plunged me straight into depression, no stopping, no waiting). So I went and took a community acting class. I figured that if I learned to convey emotions that I wasn’t feeling, I’d be able to translate the skill into conveying emotions I was feeling.
The week before the class finished, the second thing happened: my father died suddenly. I was able to grieve him much better and more openly – the class had done its work – and my emotions began to open up. I also – this feels a little disloyal, but it’s the truth – felt released from the pressure of his expectations, including the expectation of not expressing emotion. He was a good man, but like all of us he had his issues, and emotional expression was definitely one of them. He’d been through the Depression and World War II and had learned to cope by not talking about it.
A fortunate friendship
My father’s death was the trigger for me to get back in touch with a friend I’d made online the previous year. This was the late 90s, when the Internet was still relatively new to most people and a lot of today’s ways of connecting didn’t exist or were in their infancy. But a guy I knew slightly on an email discussion list had started a site for people to meet each other, including as “just friends” with no romantic expectations, and I’d decided, “Why not check it out? What could be the harm?”
A woman had posted there with a very interesting-sounding profile, and she was just looking for a friend, so I emailed her. I was apparently the only normal, non-creepy person who contacted her, and we started mailing back and forth, discussing books, and our personal struggles (including with singleness), and psychology, which she was studying, and everything else that came to mind. But then she started having computer issues, and we lost touch for a while.
When I emailed her about my father, I was also emailing another woman, who had contacted me about an article I had written on singleness on my now-long-gone Geocities website (remember Geocities?). I mentioned this second woman to the first woman, Erin, and she became indignant that I’d been emailing someone else (however innocently). This was my first clue.
We started swapping audio tapes in the mail (this was before MP3s or Skype, and you could only do video on CD-ROM). She has a pleasant voice, and I started to notice an attraction – and started to suspect it was mutual. Summoning up all my courage, I asked. It was mutual. YES!
It was the very early days of Internet romance, and it had a bad reputation. To the initial dismay of her fellow psychology students and her father (“How do you know he’s not an axe murderer?”), we decided it was serious. I went and met her – she lived in California – and then a few months later brought her out to New Zealand for Christmas to meet my friends and family. They approved, not that they got a vote, and we were married in February of 1999.
What I learned
I’ve passed 1500 words here, and I haven’t brought out a personal development lesson yet (which is what this blog is for, after all). So here it is.
If you want a change, make a change. Your life isn’t going to magically change by itself and suddenly work out when it never did before. Work on your confidence, your ability to listen, your ability to connect, your emotional management skills. Worst case: you’ll be a better and more interesting person and you’ll like yourself more.
Secondly, learn to take action. The reader who emailed me has an excellent plan: read some of the books he’s bought about confidence and interacting with women, and then join an online dating site and start practicing. I wasted far too much time having conversations in my head that should have happened outside my head, where I would quickly have learned what was what and had the opportunity to move on.
And finally, don’t take it all so seriously. Enjoy your life as it is now, let go of some of your emotional overinvestment in particular outcomes, and roll with the punches. If you’re working actively on improving your life, you’re taking action, and you’re able to become resilient to rejection, disappointment and loss, eventually things do improve.
Keep the questions coming, by the way. If there’s something you’d like me to write about, or write more about, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or send an email. I love to connect with my readers and write about what you want to know about.
