#10) Love At First Sight

Thoughts on finding Miss right

After things ended with Pamela, I kept on dating. Maybe it was more like power dating: I went on a seemingly endless series of first dates, almost all of which ended up as just that—a first date. At the same time, I noticed that in my work running a women’s rights organization, I was meeting tons of women with common interests, so I devised a new strategy to attend more events hosted by LGBTQ advocacy groups. I went to a myriad of events—from wine nights to sports outings to Broadway shows—each time arriving with high hopes of finding Miss right. Unfortunately, my optimism was thwarted, as the vast majority of attendees at these events were gay men, and among the women, almost all were either couples or straight women accompanying their gay guy friends (teases!).

“It’s so depressing,” I told Arleen as I drove into Manhattan that summer night in 2010, “I can’t seem to meet anyone interesting.” As I recounted in last week’s story, a lot of this was my own stuff of being increasingly overwhelmed with life as a single parent and my work, but that is something I realize only in retrospect. Arleen quipped that my gay thing was a ploy: I just wanted to be able to date everybody, which I assured her was not the case. But as she jested with me, I was painfully aware of how much more successful I had been at heterosexual dating: “I’m giving it one more shot with these LGBT group events. Ugh!” I was so exasperated!

I parked and walked into the bar at around 6 p.m. I did what I always did when I arrived at one of these events: I walked from the front to the back to scan the crowd for any prospects. I observed the bar: mostly gay men as usual, along with a few beautiful straight women sidekicks. Ugh! I kept walking through into the second room, and glanced at the tables of people as I passed, heading towards the bathroom. A woman at a corner table sitting with a group of other women caught my attention, but I played it cool and kept walking. After the bathroom, I turned around to walk back, and facing forward saw that she was smiling at me. I wanted to melt! She semi waved and with our eyes locked, I seemed to drift like a magnet was pulling me over to her table, where she slid over one seat and tapped the seat she was on, indicating that it was for me.

I sat down, and both of us sat still, grinning like fools at each other. My heart was beating so fast, I could hardly catch my breath! Her name was Nicole, and she was the grown up version of the girls I had mad crushes on growing up, but could never have. She had hazel eyes, medium length blond hair, and an Ivory Girl smile, dimples and all. She had a New England look, but had grown up in the Midwest where she had been recruited to play Division 1 soccer. I was totally infatuated! People came and left from our table, and then the bar, but I didn’t see any of them. We were as if in a trance. We spoke and stared into each other’s eyes, and after a bit—I couldn’t tell you if it was a minute, ten minutes, an hour, or a day—we had our first kiss at the table. Then we smiled, and stared into each other’s eyes some more.

When darkness fell, we noticed we were the only two remaining from the get together. We hopped into my car, and headed due west, for dinner. It being a weekday in the summer, the city was quiet, and we were able to get an outdoor table at an Italian restaurant in the West Village. We held hands and gazed into each other’s eyes over wine, and then dinner—laughing and sharing the stories of our lives. We discovered we had so much in common! After we paid the bill, I offered to drop Nicole off at her apartment on the Upper West Side on my way home. She invited me in, and we sat in a small garden outside her apartment, and kissed some more. She had a suitcase packed on her bed for an early morning flight on a business trip out West. I told her I would miss her, and asked if we could have dinner when she got back. “Of course,” she said, gazing into my eyes. We shared a final kiss goodnight.

I drove home that night wondering, did I just meet the woman I am going to marry? That’s who I was for my first decade of dating. I’m an optimistic, glass half-full person by nature, and back then, I entered each date with hope for the possibility that tonight, this time, I could be meeting my future partner, like in the Hollywood movies. For other people that story does come true, but not for me, yet. I learned through working on myself in therapy that being a natural optimist was a bonus for many aspects of my life, but a detriment in dating. My optimism led me to mostly see the best in others and the potential of who they could be. Like in story #2 with Arleen and Lynn, I had a false sense of power: that I could help potential partners on their journey to their best selves. This of course is not true—I had to learn the hard way through life experiences that only people can help and save themselves, as you will be reading about in future stories.

In the ensuing days, my communications with Nicole shifted. Not so gradually, I could feel her pulling back, questioning whether my interest was genuine, and the frequency of our contact diminished and became more strained. We arranged to go on a second date a couple of weeks later at a Mexican restaurant in the East Village. I was so excited to see her, but also nervous because of her shift in tone. Sure enough, after dinner, as she was walking me to my car, she dropped the bomb: she wasn’t ready for a relationship. Oh no! I implored her to give us a try—I felt heartbroken letting this get away so easily. She held firm, telling me there were things going on in her life that she was not ready to share, and that she might be leaving New York altogether, so she was not interested in pursuing a relationship. The next day I emailed, imploring her to reconsider, and promising to make whatever adaptations were necessary to give us a chance and see where this could lead. She declined. Feeling crushed, I picked up my slightly broken heart and tried to move on.

I got off the dating wagon for a bit to collect myself, and focused on getting my kids back to school. A couple of months later, I saw a speed dating event at The LGBT Center in New York City, and I thought to myself, what the heck. I had several straight friends who met men this way, so I decided to give it a try. I arrived with some trepidation, well a lot of trepidation, finding the concept a bit goofy for my style, but, I played along. About fifteen minutes in, I heard the door squeak open, and noticed out of the corner a new entrant. It was Nicole! The breath left my body, and my heart sank: I thought you weren’t ready for dating? I guess you just didn’t want to date me! For a moment, I thought about making a run for it. Instead, I decided not to make a scene, put on a brave face, and went through the motions as courteously as I could. First chance I got, I excused myself and beelined out.

A couple of weeks later, I emailed Nicole. We hadn’t said but an awkward, quick hello at the event. She responded that she had thought of emailing me too, but didn’t know what to say. We emailed back and forth, catching up on life, including my sharing that I was writing the first chapter of what I was hoping would be a book about my journey from straight to gay. We agreed to have dinner in the coming weeks when she returned from a series of business trips and a triathlon. We met at another Mexican restaurant, hoping the margaritas would take the edge off, but I was cautious, as was Nicole, and it made for an awkward evening. A few weeks later, she messaged that she was looking at rental homes in Connecticut (not far from Westchester) in a town where she had lived with a man from a relationship years before. Is this move to be up near me? I invited her to stop by after house hunting, but never heard back. My relationship with Nicole was like grains of sand: the harder I pushed, the faster the grains sifted through my hands.

Life, and the years, moved on. From time to time Nicole would pop into my mind, and I would write to say hello. Typically this happened after break-ups: an old habit I was trying to shed of remembering only the good parts of a recent ex, and revisiting the idea of an us when there was no one else to focus on. I had this sense that there was unfinished business with Nicole. She would occasionally email me too. Once, she wrote she was considering adopting a dog, but wasn’t sure she could slow her roll. She asked, what did you think? I thought if she couldn’t stand still long enough to own a dog, she wouldn’t ever be able to stick around and explore the possibility of an us. At this point she was living in Arizona, doing triathlons all over, and working for a new brand, which entailed even more business travel.

Four summers after our first date, Nicole sent a message, excitedly saying she was coming back to New York City for a couple of weeks to hire a sales rep, and asking if we could get together! She had moved to Los Angeles, but she lamented, the city had no guts and she missed New York, and was considering moving back. Maybe at last we can explore the possibility of an us! She invited me to the US Open—her high school friend’s husband had company tickets. Is this a date? Are we going as friends? While my mind swam in the possibilities, I was still feeling tender and petrified, but when she emerged from the subway and walked in my direction, my heart still skipped a beat as she flashed those dimples and million dollar smile. Few women have ever had that effect on me. That is something special, isn’t it?

We had a blast, the four of us, and it was clear her high school friend knew a lot about me. We arranged to get together again, for the first time in Westchester. The following week, we had dinner in the city, and she shared her plan to rent an apartment in Manhattan for a year. Is she doing this to finally see where things could lead? I was excited, but proceeded with caution and trepidation, which was wise: Nicole put a deposit down in what turned out to be a scam, lost a month’s worth of rent money, decided it was a sign, and returned to the West Coast.

Nicole gave up the sales rep job, and started teaching yoga. She said she would try to come East later in the fall, and invited me to come out West—your turn! Even if I still saw the possibility of an us and wanted to visit, my life would not allow it: in addition to work, my daughter was a senior in the final throes of athletic recruitment, my son was starting and adjusting to freshman year, and our dog Riley, Shep’s predecessor, was being ravaged by cancer, and I was treating him with chemotherapy at home. I emailed Nicole to ask to put things on hold, saying our energy was off, and maybe one day we would have a chapter when life allowed.

Life never did. I knew Nicole had finally slowed her roll and settled when she posted a photo of her adopted dog. She also opened a yoga studio. For my part, thoughts of Nicole faded—my heart and head moved on. I discovered life is not Hollywood, where at the end of the movie or in the post episode segment, all things are revealed. Life is messy and complicated and unpredictable, and at times mysterious and concealed. Most often, there is no karmic justice in the world of love. I will never know or understand what happened after that first night for Nicole, or even simply, how she felt about me. Oddly in retrospect, we never got more intimate than a passionate kiss.

It was smitten, not love, at first sight. My therapist back then helped me come up with a word for that strong feeling, somewhere between love and like, for a woman: I was in limerence with Nicole. Like Jenny in story #5, and other girlfriends you will meet, trying again has never—for me at least—changed the dynamic. Each time was another opportunity to repeat the same patterns in a different way that hadn’t worked the first time. Still, sometimes I still cheat and wonder if this next first date is the one—optimism is my blessing and my curse. Me, the eternal optimist still awaits, at times more patiently than at others, her happy ending.

Next week we’re going to change up the pace, and take a break from all these exes and their lessons, to explore a topic so many of you have asked about: coming out to your kids.

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