After that, I didn’t speak to him for years, though I ran into him often. We had a bit of overlap in our circle of friends, so I couldn’t avoid seeing him. It would make my stomach hurt at first, but soon I didn’t really care. I started to feel kind of sorry for him because I thought he was a bit of a loser. I mean, really. Who has TWO kids by accident? But over the years, more than one friend would occasionally make an appeal for me to reconsider him. He, too, put in an effort at this. He even started getting his hair cut at the barber shop ½ block from my apartment, even though we lived nowhere near each other…either to catch a glimpse of me or to aggravate me. Possibly a little of both. The very thought of reconciling was mostly laughable to me, though sometimes when I was between relationships I’d remember his charm and think “what if”.
History books, pop culture, and the wedding section of most newspapers are rife with stories with happy endings from love revisited. So…why not give it another shot? I’d often wondered if it could have gone differently the first time if I had been less defensive and more available. Now, we were 15 years older, which I chose to interpret as wiser. We were armed with details of what happened the first time around so we should be able to do better. Plus, surely he was all the things he was before (still smart, still funny, still a pleasure to have naked) AND presumably smarter about how to be in a relationship with me. I certainly considered myself to be better in every way. With all this in our favor, it should go better this time.
I went from thinking of this reconnection as absurd to actually becoming pretty excited about it. And what a nice story it would make! Most of the women I mentioned it to loved the idea. Interestingly, one male friend Mr X and I had in common was sure that this was not a good idea: “I don’t doubt that he wants to do this; I just don’t think he can. He doesn’t know how”. Well that response wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, but what did he know? This is a romantic story and he obviously didn’t understand. (One could surmise that the fact that I rarely identified Mr X by name when I talked to friends about my plan could’ve been a clue that, deep down, I had my own doubts about whether this was more about the fantasy than the reality. Whatever…)
