Probably the first time I proved how uncoordinated I was in both life and love was when I met Im and A.
I was in my first year at University when I met them. I had taken a very pretentious first year English subject which was designed to lure unsuspecting first year students into the morass of cultural studies and post-modernity and thereafter be lost in the belly of the beast – a rough beast that called itself the English Department. A monster that ate students alive with a side order of self-centred intellectual narcissism and topped with the thick sauce of post-colonialism, post-modernity and cultural sensitivity. One could become trapped in the beast for the rest of your degree and potentially given the Department’s penchant for ‘inter-disciplinary area studies’ the rest of your life.
It was taught by a relatively calm lesbian feminist – certainly calm relative to the firebrand women who later taught me Gender Studies – a subject choice made in second year without realising that I would be one of only three men in the course and further the only straight one. This may sound good to the men out there – a class with 3 men and 97 women. Wrong. Imagine twice weekly events which started with – “Now as the only heterosexual man here can you please elaborate for the group about the particularly heinous crime committed by your gender that we are discussing this week?” Not an environment conducive to heterosexual romantic activities – indeed not an environment conducive to the continued survival of most heterosexual men. But I digress and the story of that course is for another time.
The English tutorials were all taught by serious post-graduate students who genuinely wanted you to know how deeply they felt about Luce Irigaray and French post-structuralism. Not a safe environment for a developing mind. In my tutorial, however, was a saviour – the girl named Im. The first time Im spoke I was a goner. She was beautiful, smart, sassy and funny. She was also hopelessly devoted to her private school boyfriend – now a constantly stoned storeman and packer in a warehouse. But as is my nature I crushed hard anyway.
Now older and wiser I know that her relationship of the time was doomed to failure. A couple in high school who were now on very different paths. One with a static friendship group of high school peers who only became excited at discovering a new method for getting seriously stoned and throwing up every night. They had immense pride in their ability to get wrecked and still being able to go to work and get paid to repeat the experience the following night. And Im, at university, and surrounded by new people and new ideas. Though, if the truth be known, the difference in all of our lives at that time was that we got wrecked with different people each night rather than the experience being that of playing ball in any great intellectual playing field. But all the same an irreconcilable gap was destined to appear in their relationship – even if I did not have any experience to tell me back then.
We became friends quickly. A bond fast created by the environment in which we found ourselves. Coffee dates turned into long sessions reading, sleeping and talking on the expansive lawn in front of the twin 1970s buildings that housed most of the Arts departments. She met some of my friends and I met some of hers – including forming an uneasy friendship with her boyfriend – this bond created by my ability to eat large quantities of curry, drink copious amounts of beer and not throw up. An ability regarded with some awe by her boyfriend’s peer group.
Perhaps if I had hung tight and played friends I would have been ‘rebound boy’ when the inevitable relationship breakup occurred. A position I had parlayed before into a relationship – albeit as a teenager but at that tender age the rules seemed the same – little did I know. But I must have appeared a little too wide-eyed and adoring on a few too many occasions for her to believe friendship was my only desire. Thinking about it now I realise Im was an even smarter woman than I gave her credit for back then. Certainly a lot smarter and more mature emotionally than I was. Not that this would have been hard – pitting any reasonably mature girl against a 19 year old boy with a crush is no contest. But she worked out how I felt about her, took it in her stride and started thinking about a plan to make it all work out.
Me? I was oblivious to all of this. I thought my crush remained a secret – though heaven knows how I honestly thought that. My behaviour around her was an amusing display of misplaced noble suffering at my position as good friend and secret suitor. Indeed the faint air of silent and lovelorn suffering hung about me as I trooped from lecture to lecture and wiled away my afternoons drinking my melancholy away with an equally romantically bereft actor friend. I’d like to blame this tragic behaviour on my exposure to Shelley, Keats and the other bitter anti-heroes of Romantic poetry. But I suspect being a wanker of such high order is in the character of most self-absorbed and overly-intellectual first year university students.
I know now she certainly liked me – not romantically but as a good friend. A good enough friend not to run a mile when it became apparent I was interested in her romantically. Later experiences have shown me that most women cut men off dead when they realise that their male friend harbours feelings other than just friendship for them. Especially when those feelings are not reciprocated.
So Im decided she could find a way to balance our friendship and my lovelorn status. How? By trying to set me up with one of her friends. Knowing what I do now it was not the most original plan in history but it meant I meet A…
TO BE CONTINUED…
