Recently Snortneypoptart on FetLife had a post with this title about reconnecting with her third love. This brought to mind my third love, a relationship doomed from the start.
My first love years later became my partner. There was a woman who I should have loved but didn’t. Another woman who became my second love. And almost a year later the third love.
There’s so much about the third love which is problematic, requires explanation, turns back on itself and requires a different explanation. She was a year younger; I was a very young 19-year-old. I didn’t know her well, I’m not sure she wanted to be known.
What I did know was part of a continuing recitation. Her father was at a major university. Her boyfriend was in prison. She believed she had paranormal abilities. She liked Middle English literature. The first two were definitely true. I was excited to meet someone with a similar literary interest but when I pulled out a volume, I don’t know what, Chaucer, Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, Mossé’s Handbook of Middle English, whatever, she pushed the book away and turned the conversation to something different.
I’m not going to write about when I first spent any time with her. That requires too much explanation. I could present it one way and it would be a fun story but not really true. There are layers to what happened. What I experienced and what, on examination, I think was going on. It was an innocent bit of fun with an edge. She was still an absolute stranger to me.
And here’s an aside. I’m a demisexual who constantly found himself in relationships with people I didn’t really know. Sex first kind of relationships. That wasn’t true with the first love.
So, there’s this woman I sort of knew who was the friend of another woman I sort of knew. A month or so later there was this party and afterwards I got ready for bed. When I went to my bed this naked woman was in it telling me, “I’m spending the night.” My first impulse was to throw her out. My second was sort of, Oh hell, go for it. Back to the first impulse. Back to the second. It was easier to go for it.
I’m not sure when I became aware of the major university, the boyfriend, poltergeists, and Middle English. I am almost sure this was afterwards. After that night we spent a lot of time together. Mostly sex. Sometimes doing other things, but mostly it was fucking all the time.
There are other moments which were definitely after that first night. Her thinking it cute to hang a used tampon on a former boyfriend’s room’s doorknob. Her telling another former boyfriend, he should just give up, it was over. My realizing that this wasn’t going to last forever. I had to enjoy the moment I had and then be graceful in letting go.
She was maybe the first woman to tell me about her rape, about trying to commit suicide after, and because of state law having to be institutionalized. Just about every woman I’ve known has had their story about being raped which says a lot about men.
She told me about how her boyfriend, the one who was in prison, used to make her get condoms, her only form of birth control, from a gas station men’s room. This was fifty years ago and it was a pain in the ass buying condoms. We had condoms, but they cost so much, and we were having sex all the time. I tried to remember to use one at least once a day. So of course there was a pregnancy scare and this was before Roe vs Wade.
I associate sex with movement and with her movement was amped up several orders of ten. That was a persistent connection in my mind long afterwards. Her and movement and sex and what I wanted to find in a partner. I also associated her body type with this. Slender, barely there breasts, dark hair was already a thing for me. I was very young and I believed afterwards that the woman who would be my true love would look and be like this person. And of course later loves had large breasts and it was a disappointment because I’m an idiot.
She wasn’t the first woman I’d been with who had been comfortable having sex in front of other people, sometimes strangers, sometimes people we sort of knew or knew well. Her girlfriend used to watch us having sex. There was a guy who’d come over and sit in a chair at the foot of the bed and pretend he wasn’t watching us have sex. He helped us out one night. I wanted to drink wine off her breasts and was having trouble managing the bottle and drinking. I kept hitting myself in the head with the bottle because I’m a klutz. So he stood on the bed over us and poured and it wasn’t quite like I’d imagined but still pretty great. A nice full-bodied red wine that went everywhere.
This was all when we were in college and for the life of me I can’t remember what her major was. At the college we were going to we didn’t have to declare our majors until the end of sophomore year so maybe she was coasting along like I was, but I doubt it. I wonder that we didn’t spend more time talking, but at the same time that was a pattern I’d already developed as an anti-demisexual demisexual. The reset after this relationship broke me of that pattern.
I knew the relationship wasn’t going to last, even though I hoped it was going to last forever. Even now I can’t see signs that it wouldn’t last in spite of for others, except the prison boyfriend, it hadn’t. We were comfortable with each other, still exploring. Now I can say it was just sex but I can’t see anyone spending that much time together and have it be just sex.
There were intimations, though. The boyfriend was now out of prison and she was maybe just a bit preoccupied. The last nights together with their special focus. The term ended, we went on break, she went back home for a visit, and a week or so later I got a letter where she wrote that she loved me. We had an agreement not to say that word, love, unless we really meant it and so far it had been unsaid.
She returned and I didn’t exist. Not a word from her; I wasn’t even in the room. Her girlfriend said that the boyfriend had beat the crap out of her. She was bruised all over except where it would show. Have patience.
For a long time I was sure I would die before I reached 20. I hadn’t realized how many sorts of death there were. A month after she was back I finally went to her and got the very indefinite word that it was over. I stayed away and had only a couple of more interactions. The next was on my birthday when she was there smiling at me as if nothing had happened. The day after my birthday I was hit by a car. I had made it to 20 physically unscathed and now I had my arm in sling and hurt a lot all the time. We met again in the cafeteria and she wondered to our friends why I was always in the way. The last time was in a car, on break, both of us in the back seat sitting as far apart as possible. We were dropping her off at her home, staying the night, and heading on, eventually to New York City. Her parents were really nice, I got to meet the boyfriend and he wasn’t an ogre. And that was that. One more term at our college and she transferred to a university in her state.
Strangely, for decades I misremembered her last name. I never was able to find her in the college annual or alumni directory. After my mom died, while going through my mom’s things, I came across an old address book which had her name and number. She and her girlfriend and their friends spent a lot of time with my mom, going to her house to cook fancy dinners and do stuff like that. I barely remember being at one dinner, but maybe that was before things were over between us. Anyway, with the right last name I was able to track her down online. Her parents were dead; their kindness was the high point of that trip years previous. She’s married to an economist and I hope she and he are happy.
I was going to end this with a bit about when I first spent any time with the woman who became my third love but as I wrote earlier it’s just too complicated to describe in any meaningful fashion. Instead, after we were back at school from break my first love returned to town with her baby daughter intending to attend the fall term. They were staying with my mom until she could find an apartment, but first she stopped by my dorm room to visit. I have a photo her father took then. She’s standing by the station wagon, baby bottle in hand. Most people think her hair is black but it is a dark auburn. In the photo the sun hits a spray of her long hair that has risen up above her shoulder in the breeze and that hair is ablaze like fire. The end of that summer just before I left the country for a semester abroad program I visited her in her apartment and the woman who I should have loved but didn’t took a photo of us and we are sitting there looking at each other with huge smiles on our faces. When I returned that winter the woman who was my first love had left college and the state with a graduate student who was to become her husband. I wouldn’t see her again for six years.
