Chapter 6

It was during one of my last visits with my father that he really pushed the joys of family – of meeting someone, marrying them, and raising children together. I think his own regrets only drove him harder to impress into my mind what he was feeling. He repeatedly stressed the joy my sister and I had brought to his life, the happiness he felt each time he saw my sister’s daughter playing in the backyard when they came to visit him.

To be honest, I understood him more that I ever let on. I admired the man he was – both the stern father he had been to me, and the carefree, smiling grandfather he was becoming, just before he past on. He provided a strong, solid environment to grow up in, a product of his own closely-knit relationship to his brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles who we saw frequently. I knew the joy of family without needing to have my own. I was never able to put it into words, but I think he knew how I felt. Still, he never stopped hinting about my tendency towards independence, and my obvious lack of any romantic life. He wanted me to take a risk, let someone get close to me; he wanted me to find her, marry her, and create a family with her.

I never dated in high school, much to my father’s disappointment. I avoided the whole scene as I entered college, which made my dad more persistent in pushing any available girl at me. He would casually drop names of colleagues whose daughters were near my age, who were single and attending such and such university with this or that major. I lived in constant fear that, any visit home would include some “chance” encounter with one of these single females and the inevitable awkward blind date. My dad, best intentions aside, just didn’t understand that one crucial part of me – that I wasn’t interested.

I have a romantic, idealist heart; it’s not that manly to admit, but there it is. So, though I often told myself I would never find someone, I stilled harbored the small hope of that electric “first meeting” between me and my future soul mate. I had rationalized this ideal, constructing a logic which concluded that any footwork on my part would be rather pointless. My true soul mate and I would, by fate or circumstance, be brought together someday. When that happened, we would both know it. We would find each other because we were meant to. I just had to wait.

I didn’t blindly buy into this fantasy. The love at first sight scenario was well-ingrained into my psyche by the often-repeated story of my parents’ first introduction to one another. She was leaving her job, a waitress at a local diner, when my father spotted her. Besotted, he tracked her down, finding a common acquaintance, who set up a group date. That first face to face moment was, as they told it, electric. They talked for hours, holding each others’ hands as though it was the most natural thing to do. That was their love story, and it became the love story I compared all other love stories to. So, while I secretly harbored faith in true love, dreaming about that one day where I would meet that person, I consciously rejected any need for me to get out there and “play the field” or whatever other dating metaphor I was told to follow.

I also avoided the whole dating scene because I was…well…not quite confident that I would have much success. On a good day, I considered myself average. Average looks, average personality, average average. I was one of those people you met and forgot about two minutes later. I would be constantly re-introduced to others at parties or other social occasions. I would sit there anticipating the whole interchange – me saying hello, pretending it was the first time to meet them, them pretending that they would remember my name the next time I might run into them. At the last party I attended, I was reintroduced to five people I had been in class with the previous semester. Too bad I wasn’t attractive enough for Missy, Michelle, Margaret, Elisabeth, and Mary to remember. I fully expected rejection from any attempt to “pick up” someone, so why put myself through the pain?

The constant snubbing grew so common that I stopped going out with friends to occasions where such mingling might be required. It was just a reminder: I was far, far down on the totem pole of social desirability. Why bother? On off moments, when I spent another Friday evening alone, the television on as background noise, I allowed myself to question my isolation. I let myself imagine life as a charismatic and charming mixer, with a wide range of friends to call and meet with. I tried to see myself in bars, at clubs, shouting over the mass chaos of music, people and white noise. It never worked. No matter how much social mixing was considered a good thing, it just didn’t seem worth the effort.

For the most part, however, my homebody tendencies were something I pushed out of my mind, refusing to acknowledge it as a problem. I did have a small group of people I could hang out with when I was feeling desperately social; this, I told myself, was enough. And, for the most, it was.

But there were times when I felt an inexplicable ache – a yearning for something foreign yet familiar – that would slowly spread, beginning deep within the center of my chest, and ooze out until it covered my entire heart in a dull pain of longing. I often marveled at this sensation, this instinctive desire for something I had yet to experience. Why did I feel I was missing something I had yet to know?

What makes us so obsessed with finding love – finding a companion, a soulmate, etc, etc? I understand the yearning for things lost, experiences past, feelings that bring us back to a specific time and place in our lives. These memories are records of our sensual highs and lows – tidbits of information that inflame and feed our desire for more. I understood my yearning for warm macaroni and cheese on cold, blistery days; the smell wafting around me brought me to afternoons of snowball fights, and sledding, and my mom, who would have a fresh batch of Kraft waiting as we came in from the yard. Yet, in the case of love, with no previous knowledge to drive this new and unsettling desire, I had now idea of how to satiate it, or even why I had it in the first place. Having never been attracted to or involved with anyone, I had no idea what I to look for, feel, think, expect.

My parent’s relationship could be seen as a standard to aspire for, but it wasn’t like I could actually get into their minds and feel what they felt the first time they saw each other, or when they were older, feel what they felt when they would sneak off for some time alone together. Sure, I knew a familial love – the knowledge that I had people around me that supported me and cared for me. But, in the world of my childhood, this was a fact that I assumed applied universally; I only realized the special nature of our family bond when I watched the disputes of my friends and their own siblings or family members. It made me cherish my family more and added to the responsibility I felt towards maintaining the standards and values my parents proffered.

No, it wasn’t perfection. Our family fought, each of us ingrained with a certain stubbornness that made for some spectacular sparks. But the heat was quick to lose its intensity, and they never seemed to threaten the core relationship that knit us together. I found amazing comfort in that stability, in the absolute certainty of our kinship. And I was determined to have future generations benefit from the same trust, companionship, love.

But love that involved intimacy and attraction and sex – was something beyond my realm of comprehension. These were emotions driven by a force greater than a desire for a family network, the shared connection of bloodlines. And it threw me, what made the process of falling in love feel like such a conundrum. Besides, with the statistics of failed relationships, the constancy in which I saw others fall in and out of “love”, the word had, in my mind, been rendered meaningless. And that made it impossible to imagine how I might ever find stop the ache that I managed to keep to myself.