Dating 9 - 5: Part 2

I met the only other guy from work I ever dated at a junior high school where we both taught ten years ago. What attracted me to him at first was that he was incredibly smart, so I’ll call him the Professor. He also seemed shy, and I’ve always had a soft spot for shy guys. One time we had a staff lunch, and no one even realized the Professor was missing until I went down the hall to get him. I remember distinctly thinking to myself, “I wonder if he would ask me out if I paid a little more attention to him.” So a couple times I went into his classroom to eat lunch with him.

Sure enough, a few weeks later, he stopped by my classroom and asked me out – as he stood in the doorway, a good 25 feet away from me. I found it endearing.

We went out to dinner several times. Even after I ended up quitting the job suddenly one day after a quasi-nervous breakdown, the Professor never held it against me. Since I was living at home at the time, he met my dad. They’d both been history majors in college, so every time we went out, we would come back to my place and he would talk to my dad – at considerable length – about history. The day after I lay down on the living room carpet and fell asleep as they chatted away about esoteric topics I knew nothing about, I realized that he was a better “match” for my dad than for me! That’s when it became clear that the Professor and I were just friends.

Well, it became clear to me, anyway. Although he always refused my offers to pay for my share of dinner, I thought, “Oh, he’s just old-fashioned.” We had never so much as held hands, let alone kissed, and never had any sort of relationship-defining talk, so I assumed he also felt we were just friends.

I moved to Boston for a year, then moved again to settle in New York City. The Professor and I had known each other about three and a half years when I became unemployed again and began spending my time focusing on my social life and dating in earnest. One night my boyfriend at the time answered my apartment phone when it rang. It was the Professor.

When I got on the phone, he acted like everything was normal. But when we met for dinner a month or so later, he suddenly asked, “Who was that guy who answered the phone at your place?”

“Oh, we’ve been dating for the past couple of months,” I said.

“Really??” The Professor looked astonished, then became quiet. He didn’t say too much after that.

Until a couple months later, when we went to the beach. We didn’t bring swimsuits or anything, just walked along the water and had dinner. I was standing on the sand, gazing at the beautiful blue water, when the Professor moved to hug me – and then he kissed me! On the lips! I was stunned, almost literally!

So I did what any sane, mature person would do: pretended it hadn’t happened.

We went to dinner and then got in his car to drive home. But eventually he turned down the radio and asked, “Do you ever think of me as ‘husband material’?”

!!!

Of course I had to say no. I just didn’t feel that way about him at all. I explained that he was way too smart for me, that sometimes he talked about topics in a discussion I had no hope of contributing to, that he should find someone more traditional from his Orthodox church to date, etc.

And that, I thought, was that. We stayed friends, though as the years went on, we saw each other less often – every three to four months, on average – and most often when I went home to see my dad (the Professor’s true love :).

But just last week, we met for dinner one night, and I was telling him about my friend’s upcoming wedding. He asked if it was difficult for me to watch “everyone” getting married.

“No, not really,” I said. “Not all of my friends are getting married. And it’s not like I haven’t been dating.”

He nearly dropped his fork. “Really!?” he said. He was quiet for a minute, staring down at his plate. Then he looked at me and asked, “So I still don’t factor into the equation at all?”

It was so awkward! He talked about how we’ve known each other for nearly ten years now, how good we are together, we communicate so well -- though as two of my good friends said, apparently we DON’T if he really thought we still had a shot together!

Then he said, “I’ve asked you to marry me four times!”

Now it was my turn to nearly drop my fork. “What are you talking about?” I said. “A proposal is getting down on one knee and giving a ring. I don’t remember anything like that!”

“It was close enough,” he said. He considered the kiss at the beach a proposal, as well as another time a few years later when he looked at me and said, out of the blue, “You’re going to marry me one day.” (For the record, my response was, “No, I’m not. We’re friends.”) As for the other two times he supposedly proposed – I really have no idea.

So I had to explain again that I just didn’t feel that way about him, that he was a great guy but just not for me, etc. He wanted to know exactly why I didn’t like him in that way (“Is it my glasses? Are they too thick?”). I felt terrible. We talked for a long time, though, and finally he seemed to get the idea.

“Even though this conversation didn’t having the outcome that I’d hoped, I’m glad we talked,” he said. “I was craving intimacy. Not sexual intimacy, but spiritual intimacy.”

I know there’s something reassuring and comforting about a friend you’ve known for a long time; I can understand how for some friends, it turns into more. And it would’ve made my life so much easier if I could’ve just fallen in love with the Professor. If I had, we’d probably have been married for six or seven years by now. But after ten years, I think it’s safe to say it’s never going to happen. Hopefully he finally understands that.

Sigh.

Dating 9 - 5

Name: Work
What it is: The place where you show up every day and do stuff in exchange for money
Cost: Free – actually, they pay you to be there!
Random fact: According to The Office Life web site (http://www.theofficelife.com/work-dating-office-romance.html), “a recent survey of 610 working men and women by vaultreports.com showed that 58% of people claimed to have had a workplace relationship, and a surprising 23% admitted to having ‘relations’ on office property.” (Makes you think twice before touching anything in the supply closet, doesn’t it?)
The scoop: I know they say lots of couples meet at work, but if I were counting on my job to supply my social life, I wouldn’t have had a date since 1998. I’ve only been asked out by a co-worker twice, and I only actually went out with one of them – a pretty low number, considering I’m 35 years old and have had a TON of jobs (staying at each one for only a year or two). And both of those co-workers were fellow teachers -- kind of funny, considering the stereotype about 90% of teachers being female. (Middle schools actually have a more even ratio of male to female teachers, in my experience). When I was in my twenties, my single young co-workers had no interest in me, and the rest of my co-workers were at least ten years older. Now that I’m in my thirties, the co-workers in my age group are either already married or gay, and the others are at least ten years younger!

My dates: I’ll call the first guy, simply, the Lonely Man, because I think he was. We met right after I moved to South Texas as a naïve 23-year-old, ready to save the world by teaching eighth grade English. He’d moved there years earlier from some other state and was teaching gifted/talented English to sixth, seventh and eighth graders. A few of us teachers went out to dinner one night, and although Lonely Man was a little strange and didn’t smile much, I learned that he played classical guitar, which was cool. He was also in his 40s – twenty years older than I was.

In the teachers’ lounge a few days later, one of my female co-workers casually asked, “How old a guy would you consider dating?”

Having no idea where she was coming from, I said, “I probably wouldn’t go more than ten years older.”

“So, 43 is too old, then?”

I said yes. She looked pensive. “I feel really awkward about this,” she said, awkwardly, “but Lonely Man likes you and he wanted me to ask you if you’re interested in him. But I know he’s too old for you.”

That’s really how it happened. It was so junior high, you would’ve thought we were the students, not the teachers! But, he was only the third guy who’d ever asked me out in my entire life (the other two had been two years earlier, in college, and neither of those relationships had lasted very long), so I was still flattered. After school that day, as I posted my students’ work on the walls of the trailer that was my classroom, Lonely Guy came around. We made small talk for a bit, and he finally said if I’d be interested in doing something one night.... Because I was nervous, I cut him off by blurting out, “Sure! That’d be fun!” even though I had no romantic interest in him.

He said okay. But the weird thing was, he never actually asked me out after that. A couple months later, he actually made plans with my roommate (only two years older than I was) to attend a concert. But when she got a strange vibe from him, she said, “We’re just going as friends, right?” He said, “Yes, because I know you wouldn’t go otherwise.” Sufficiently weirded out, she cancelled on him.

A couple months later, I ended up even more relieved that Lonely Man and I had never gotten together when a group of us met for dinner, and he talked about some sort of pest that was being a nuisance in his yard – maybe groundhogs? And he proceeded to tell us all proudly that he had taken to trapping the animals and drowning them in his bathtub. !!! I was horrified. I’ve always thought drowning has to be one of the worst ways to go, whether you’re a person or an animal. It was extraordinarily creepy.

I moved away a couple years later, and a few years after that, I learned that Lonely Man had died. :O Yes. He had moved to a bigger city to take a new teaching job – surprising, because he’d lived in that small South Texas town for so long, I thought he’d retire there – and the rumor was that he had killed himself. :( I felt a little guilty at first. If I had dated him, maybe he wouldn’t have committed suicide. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that’s really, really, REALLY not a good reason to date somebody.

Tomorrow I’ll post about the other guy I met at work – whom I’ve actually (according to him) been dating for ten years (!). Stay tuned....