So much dodging

Did I tell you about seeing an old – what should I call him? not boyfriend but someone who would call me every day and took me to meet his parents and told me he could see a future with me but then married the woman he had been driving 12 hours each way to see about once a month the entire time he was carrying on with me? – JERK at my college reunion?

Well I did see him.

I saw him and he looked awful – super skinny, which could be illness and is nothing to mock, but also with long – like down to his waist – scraggly, dirty hair.

The thinness might not be a choice.

But the hair was.

My friend Karen Ashby wrote a poem about it:

Reunion

How appropriate

You aged like you treated me

Rather terribly

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Well.

I just heard about another former boyfriend and I use that word so, so lightly.

This guy – let’s call him Dick – was from grad school. We dated in the spring of my first year and in that summer.

I was supposed to spend the fall semester in Rotterdam.

I flew to Rotterdam and spent two days there before returning to Austin because –

DO NOT DO THIS! DO NOT DO THIS STUPID THING, YOUNG WOMEN –

because I missed him so much.

(WTAF was I thinking?)

In the two days that I was gone, he had already asked out my friend Sabine. We were only beginning friends so she didn’t know I was crazy about Dick. He told her that he and I were not at all serious, which I guess would have been OK if he had given me the same information. He did not.

He told me he had planned to spend the semester apart thinking about our relationship, so I waited until the end of the semester, hoping, hoping.

(I was so stupid.)

I should have just said, Oh OK. You want to break up. Bye.

But I didn’t. So a lot of my misery is my own fault.

After that semester, I realized that I had put myself through extra torture for nothing because sure enough, he did not want to be with me.

I also spent the semester being really angry at Sabine, which was unfair to her. She kept pushing and trying to revive our friendship. It wasn’t until she told me everything that had happened with her and Dick and we discovered that he had used the exact same lines on both of us that I was over him and back with her.

She and I have been close friends every since.

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As one does, over the years, I googlestalked Dick. He married a woman who taught at a small college in California. She looks like a nice person. They had two children. He already had one child from his first marriage. (He was divorced when I met him.)

I talked to Sabine yesterday and she, also, has googlestalked. And she discovered that he is married again.

His third marriage.

And he married a woman more than 20 years his junior.

And they have two toddlers together.

Yes he is on his third marriage and his fourth and fifth children.

Y’all, he is 68 years old.

With two toddlers.

He will not get to sleep at night for years.

He will not have a peaceful house for decades.

He will never be able to retire.