Let me see if I can drag this dead horse into the conversation …

I’ve never met with success trying to find a partner. They show up at the oddest of times, pretty much exactly when I’ve given up. And, to that end, I’ve been on one “successful” date, inasmuch as we lived together for a few months. But she turned out to be what I needed to get used to cohabitation again ahead of meeting my first wife.

I’ve been fully and inescapably in love twice. Once in 1998, and the other in 2009. In both cases, not only was hooking up not the goal; it was actively against either the situation or what had been agreed to. This oddly provides something of a comfortable situation to be oneself without artifice.

The 1998 story is a whole bunch of random shit had to happen just so for me to end up meeting her (she was nominally my boss for nine days while I designed my first newspaper pages). She did not want to hire me and was forced to take me on by the ed-chief, who rightly pointed out she needed staff, and that as a school paper, that meant bringing on people with zero experience.

She continued to be my boss, but that was really sort of a moot point by the time we put the paper to bed, had a 2 a.m. dinner with the rest of the production team and went home together. Nine days. She had her place, I had mine, and it was immediately clear we were overpaying for housing as a result.

Now, if 1998 required all of these specific things to come together, that was amateur hour. That was just upbringing and specific timing on being edited for a news story by the EIC because the news ed was at lunch. It was the end of a call he took as I left, where I heard only one side (this was a landline call) that included “yes, we are looking for designers.” I turned around from the door after hearing that and mentioned I might be interested.

I have no doubt that without the social aspects I found myself thrust into, I would not have ended up in journalism. In under two weeks, I had a circle of friends, a girlfriend and a calling.

Now, as I said, amateur hour.

The second wife, that’s where everything really comes to bear. It requires everything from the first chick I fucked to I-5 freezing from Ashland to Tacoma. Oh, and about five years, as I initially reached out to her before getting serious with my first wife. She wanted nothing to do with me and sort of told me to go find my own kink adventure. “I really have no interest in teaching anyone.”

So there I was, crashing on a friend’s sofa ahead of the holidays, trying to find work and maybe a little fun on the side. I started talking with this ex without knowing I’d already contacted her (different OKCupid account on her end) and been shot down. I’d worn out my two-week estimate for saying with him several exits back, and our conflicting definitions of “out this weekend” led to a chain of events.

I had one night of the unexpected two covered with a former coworker, but there was one glaring hole ahead of getting up to Tacoma so my lesbian ex could fuck me and then abruptly leave to admit all that had happened to her wife. She’d already played this game once before, driving down to Medford, getting a hotel room and then … crying and driving back. But her sister worked for Marriott, so I had the room with neither of us paying … I just needed to cover Saturday night.

And so, as one does, I reached out to the chick who was engaging me because I mentioned on my profile that I still slept with a stuffed animal. “Fancy a visitor?”

She can likely better explain what compelled her to say yes, but she did. She lived on the coast and was thus a logical stop for the night while I enjoyed the unfrozen 101 on my way up. She did want to know one thing: Did I contact her specifically to fuck her? Because that wasn’t going to fly. And no, at that time, I did not.

The problem was readily apparent upon walking into her kitchen. Oh, she didn’t realize it yet, but I looked at the magnets on her fridge, just a glance, and what was immediately core-of-my-being was “this is not the last time I’m going to be in this room.”

And this was absurd, because I was introduced to her kids as “an old friend.” But as one does, we watched both Labyrinth and The Neverending Story, part of the way through which she, having made sure I was not there for sex, said, “You know you can touch me, right?” Which isn’t as dirty as it sounds and also totally out of character for her.

So I timidly grabbed her hand, and at this point, all was lost. It was like touching a part of me and thus quite weird. She had the same reaction, which would in a week be somewhat of a bad time for her then-boyfirend who’d come down for the holidays.

But it wasn’t settled yet. That would take getting up to Tacoma and having a six-hour call in which it became clear I was going back to Oregon.

So, dating? Yeah, that can be rough, but I prefer skipping that whole bit and just waking up next to someone who was apparently just waiting for me to show up.