I am the worst match-maker in history

Harry and I hit it off. We met through a mutual friend initially on a group skiing holiday. The ski holiday was an annual event with this particular friendship group. Harry joined us for at least three years in a row. In between ski holidays we caught up regularly at dinner parties and various functions. Once at a friend’s wedding Harry and I spent the whole night dancing with each other. The young man at the bar commented, “you two are the grooviest couple here tonight”. We laughed because we never were a couple, just good friends. We talked about anything and everything: our respective upbringings, our separate aspirations for life, past and present relationships, work, fitness, children, cooking etc etc. Harry was raised in the country with few resources. However, his high intelligence saw him excel at every thing he put his mind to. He was also a perfectionist. He was a triathlete. At the time he worked as a financier for merchant banks. When he asked me if I had any single friends that he might be interested in, I felt that I knew him well enough to give the match-making thing a go. I attempted it twice. Both attempts were dismal failures for completely different reasons. In the past I found that friends of mine from different aspects of my life, usually got along well when introduced. It made sense. If I like both of them, its likely they would have things in common.  The first attempt was his idea. He wanted to host a dinner party for me, the hub and my chosen single friend. Harry cooked his usual dinner party fare: bread to dip in olive oil and balsamic vinegar for starters, lentil soup, risotto with porchini mushrooms and pears poached in red wine syrup with low fat ice cream. The food was excellent. The conversation was mostly easy. My friend Judy and Harry found that they both went to Monash University at the same time (her to study maths education and him to study chemistry), they both were into the outdoors, he talked about trout fishing and she talked about bush walking holidays and skiing. Things were going fine until she found out he drove a Porche and he told her that he subscribed to The Australian Opera. She voiced her opinion against opera strongly. She believed opera was elitist and divided society into Haves and Have-not’s. After this we had dessert and the conversation returned to lighter topics. However, I felt that Judy’s socialist tendencies clashed so fiercely with Harry’s extravagant life style and liberal views that future dating between the two of them was unlikely. I was therefore not surprised the next day on the phone when Harry expressed to me that he would not be pursuing the friendship with Judy further. What I had not expected was the reason for his decision. “Bindi”, he said, “I’m sorry but I’m just not into pear-shaped women”. The second time I tried to match-make Harry. I decided a less confronting situation was in order. I invited a group of friends out to go clubbing: two girlfriends from play group along with Harry and Dana. I introduced Harry to Dana within the group and let them dance together or chat as they saw fit. Dana is a very attractive woman. She is lively and great fun to be with. I have often said that were I a man, I would be in love with Dana. I could not imagine a man who would not be interested in her. Dana was single after a heart breaking divorce. Like Harry, Dana was raised in country Victoria. She had left teaching (where I met mer) and was running her own printing business close to the town where she grew up. Although she was a self sufficient and successful business woman, she was looking for a man to look after her. In her words, she wanted to meet “a man in a suit”.  I thought Harry could be her guy. She arrived wearing a revealing outfit. She seemed subdued and slightly nervous. Dana and Harry found time to talk to each other. They danced for a short while. Neither of them looked relaxed. Dana had invited some of her friends from her home town to join us.  She became more animated and relaxed when they arrived but spent more time dancing with them than she did with us. Later she left us to kick on to another venue with these friends. Our remaining group of four opted for a quieter end to the night. We found a cafe and drank hot chocolate before heading home our separate ways. Harry seemed to get along better with my two married friends than he had with Dana. I held hopes that perhaps he may have been interested to see her again at least. However he was not interested in the slightest. His assessment of Dana: “she’s just too agricultural”.  Later I caught up with Dana. “No, not my type”, she told me, “too neat and tidy. He looks gay”. After that, I gave up! I have never and will never attempt match-making again.

No White Flag

“I’ve still got sand in my shoes, and I can’t shake the thought of you. I should get on and forget you. But why would I want to? I know we said goodbye, anything else would have been confused. But I want to see you again”. [Sand In My Shoes, Dido]. The job of moving on is a hard thing to do.  The hardest break-up I experienced was with a tall, blonde, athletic Ukranian. We dated for two years. It was during a difficult period of my life. My mother died. He was the last of my lovers to have known my mother. Its possible that my need for security at that time in my life made the split harder to take. However difficult a split is for me I have reflected recently that in general my psychological tactic has been to latch onto the failings of the other. In the case of my tall Ukranian, after we split faults were easy to find. For example, he used to set ridiculous ultimatums. I was playful and could not take them seriously. I tended to push boundaries and flout his ultimatums. To punish me for my behaviour he would withdraw. Once when we were swimming down here at the very beach I still spend all of my summer holidays at, he gingerly entered the water. “Don’t splash me or I will never trust you again”, he warned. Of course, in my book, the only thing to do in this situation is to splash and if possible, trip. He lacked humour. As far as he was concerned I had breached his trust entirely. “I think you are too immature for a sexual relationship”, he pronounced gravely afterwards. Yes! That’s right Possums, he threatened to withdraw from sex because of this. After we split I vowed to never again have an intimate relationship with a person who wagered sex in arguments. Its hard to believe upon writing this story that I ever regretted splitting up with him, but I did for a long time. Focussing on this and his many other failings helped me to recover. There were quite a few actually. He was a creature of habit, cooked the same four meals on a rotational basis and if I joined him in the kitchen had to put up with strict instructions and routine, routine.  We clashed here. My cooking is organic and experimental. He had pannic attacks occasionally to the point where he would purposely lose tournaments in his sport of choice (fencing) to not have to appear in front of the assembly for the trophy. His insecurity manifested iself in our relationship in many ways, right down to long listening sessions on my part. And he was obsessed with his mother. (But he was beautiful. I adored the entire length of  his body during our relationship). I saw him again out of the blue four years ago at the Melbourne Cup. I had since had four children. He was still single, and incredibly nervous at meeting me. I have no desire to keep in touch with him or to ever see him again, but I have been thinking about the process of splitting lately and I wondered why I had been holding on to those bad times. I have decided to let them go because I don’t need them anymore. There were plenty of good times. He taught me how to cook traditional Ukranian food, and decorate eggs for Easter. We went on fishing and beach holidays together up the east coast. We were physically and emotionally intimate for two years. I met the hub less than a year after our split. I destroyed all of our photos after I was married, but my memory is clear. Now, twenty years later I am able to look back upon those memories through a different lens. It has therefore occured to me to ask the question, is it possible to break up with someone without going through a stage of remembering only the bad? Remembering the bad can justify the split and give you a sense of control. Remembering the good brings back the pain of grief for what might have been. Remembering the good happens within a state of melancholy as the process of grief works its way through your psyche. But why is melancholy such an unbearable, intollerable thing? Melancholy is associated with every phase of becoming who we aspire to be. And we are forever and always constantly becoming. This I have been reading about in the philosophy of Judith Butler. Why did it take me so long to see the light? I can walk with sand in my shoes.

Overwhelming Evening

Hello Possums. I just don’t know where to begin! So much happened at the reunion last night and I am still overwhelmed by it.

Accompanied by Mr Zhisou as arranged, the evening started off sedately. Amongst the crowd of two hundred old collegians, it was difficult to recognise anyone except for the people I had kept in touch with. Everyone was so much older that you had to literally squint at their name tags to determine whether or not : 1. they were in your year at school; 2. you remembered their name. So we found a table, drank champagne and enjoyed each others company, leaving it to the other people to do the squinting and remembering.

After an hour of this, I was noticed and approached by the sister of my first ever boyfriend! It was wonderful to see her, but when she told me that he was at the reunion too I went weak in the knees. How I felt at that moment is difficult to describe. Surprised, yes, I had not anticipated the possibility of seeing him there. But I also experienced a rare variety of excitement. I don’t think there is an exact word for it.

The secondary college was an amalgamation of my old high school with the local technical school. Whilst his sister attended the high school, he went to the tech. It therefore hadn’t occurred to me when I purchased my ticket that I might be reunited with him on the night.

When I was fifteen we dated for eighteen months. I left him for his best friend. However, there continued to be an attraction between us. I hadn’t seen him for twenty-two years! It was a beautiful moment, Possums.

Meanwhile, Mr Z changed his shirt and started really getting into the party atmosphere with my best friend!!

Too much water has gone under the bridge to let something like this come between us. My girlfriend and I realized that Mr Z was enough of a man for both of us and we left as a very happy threesome.

Unfair dismissal

Hello Possums. For those of you not from Melbourne, we have a comedy duo on our drive-time radio: two young men stuck in school-boy mode called Hamish and Andy. They are pretty funny and very endearing, if not juvenile.

Their phone-in segments are usually a scream, yet lately the responses they are getting from the public are very unimaginative. Yesterday they offered to busk (for some purpose, maybe a charity, didn’t catch that part, but you can check their website or podcasts if you’re that interested) and wanted their listeners to suggest which busking discipline each of them should choose in their quest. We caught the start of the segment in the car on the way to the shopping center and the two calls that came in during this particular journey were very dull. The suggestions were: tap dancing and miming! Can you believe people would choose these for a radio program? The kids and I did a little brainstorm in the short time we had before we got out of the car and between us we thought of heaps more fun ideas, for example: playing the kazoo!

They also played repeats of another call in. This segment played listener’s stories in response to, What is the stupidest reason you have had for giving someone the flick? They repeated a bloke’s story (twice in our short journey) of how he left a woman because he heard her fart like a trooper.

Now apparently the repeated air play indicates that this is really funny. My response is: Is that the best people could come up with? I’m sure many of you out there have much funnier stories. I’m actually going to give it a go myself and tell you the story of the Super Hero Party (the third worst date ever):

Fearless Fly Gets the Flick

I met this guy at fencing. (I used to fence – still have my foil). I was in between serious relationships. That seemed to be my pattern in those days – two year relationships from the age of 16, one after the other. Although, this was a patch of uncertainty for me and I was also at the stage of my dating career that I was fed up with wasting time dating if I wasn’t really interested in the person. I had said to my friend Sue at a girly dinner in Lygon Street – if I think the next person isn’t someone I could imagine being with forever, I’m not even going to pursue it. I’m sick of dead-end relationships. My next boyfriend is going to be the one I want to marry!

This guy from fencing was new to the scene, and he seemed to have a good sense of humour and lots of energy in a bouncy, fun sort of way. He was cute without being handsome, and he didn’t immediately attract me in terms of sex appeal, but when he asked me on a date, I said yes because I thought I would at least have a bit of fun, and who knows where it could go… So, I was prepared to find out if we clicked or not.

He invited me to a Super Hero Party. This appealed to my fun side and I was open to meeting a new bunch of people and being introduced to his friends. So on the day of the date, I went to the fabric shop in the morning and purchased some fabric to make a super hero cape in lime green and yellow, and a yellow top edged in the same green fabric with a red ‘R’ on it. I had red basketball shorts, yellow tights, black boots, a black face mask and a short boyish hair cut at the time – put it all together and you get: Robyn, the Boy Wonder!

I spent the rest of the day making this outfit. At 8pm that evening I put it all on and waited for him to pick me up. I was pretty pumped, and ready for a party because the outfit looked great! My family were all home watching telly and I just lounged around as Robyn the Boy Wonder waiting and waiting, and waiting, and waiting…

I started to get frustrated, and concerned. I rang him and he said that he was putting his outfit together, sorry he was running late but he’d been at work and hadn’t had time, but that he’d be there to pick me up when he finished – very soon.

Waiting, waiting…

At 11pm he finally arrived. I opened the door to find him standing there as Fearless Fly. He had a tea-egg as a mask, opened up with the mesh sections over his eyes and the handles sticking upwards as antennae. He looked hilarious and perfectly Fearless Fly. (It’s worth getting a tea-egg from the kitchen and having a look at how funny this looks in the mirror, or getting someone else to model it for you, then you’ll get the gist of just how funny a sight it was).

Unfortunately, I had serious humour failure and by this stage was very tired and had been bored out of my skull with hanging around, not to mention my concern that I had an early start the next morning at my part-time job (cooking the brekky shift at the Pancake Parlour). Needless to say I was more than mildly unimpressed, and bordering on being totally pissed off. But, you try articulating these sentiments to Fearless the Fly – impossible, it can’t be done! So we went to the party.

It was at someone’s house in Nothcote. It had a large lounge/dining room area in the old 50’s post-war design, connected to a separate kitchen and a hall that you could walk around and end up back in the lounge again. It was dimly lit and there was a huge crowd, not particularly sober at this stage in the night. I wasn’t a big drinker anyway and there was no way I was going to catch up with this lot. He didn’t introduce me to any one, and I lost sight of him soon after we entered. There was no dancing and people were not that friendly. All I remember is talking to an overtly gay guy, who was nicely pickled by alcohol at this stage, about how much he adored Robyn the Boy Wonder.

I found my ‘date’ amongst the crowd in the kitchen at 12.30 and asked him to drive me home, citing my early start as the reason. He was surprised and if he was shitty, he disguised it well. He dropped me off and that was the last I ever spoke to him. I totally gave him the cold shoulder at fencing and he never approached me. I did hear through another fencer that he was perplexed about my behaviour, in a brief conversation that went like this:

Such-and-such can’t understand why you stopped talking to him. He thinks its very strange for a person to shut another person out for no reason.

My response: Well if he wants to know why, all he has to do is ask me.

But he never did and that was that!

Twilight Inn Cafe

Hello Possums. I was tossing up between ‘The Twilight Inn Cafe’ and ‘The Worst Date Ever’ for this entry. Then I reflected that perhaps it was the second worst date ever, and for a title that didn’t sound as neat…

They’ve turned the Twilight Inn Cafe into a Gallery! Of course it was probably close to 20 years ago that my friend, In, and I used to go there. In is Celanese. I know this is probably not what that country is called anymore, but that is how she referred to herself when I first met her in a Maths lecture at uni in third year. We were sitting next to eachother copying down notes that Prof W scribbled onto the rotating blackboard at an alarming pace (too fast for me to understand anyway), when for about the third time he realised that he had used subscript ‘i’ instead of ‘j’ all the way through the proof, so he went backwards around the rotating blackboard and with a licked finger, scrubbed off the i’s and replaced them with j’s. Am I boring you yet, Possums? Well, believe me, you don’t know the meaning of the word bored, unless you were there! It was soooo boring watching him dithering through his subscripts. In and I simultaneously just couldn’t take it any longer and we turned to each other with synchronized motion and struck up a conversation – the beginning of a long friendship. I remember her contagious laugh and the whiteness of her teeth. She went through a knitting phase at uni as well. She knitted bright psychedelic pieces that she gave as gifts, and I remember walking around campus with her while she knitted; a ball of wool in her pocket as we walked and talked. She didn’t need to look at her work. The fingers would just go for it of their own accord.

The two of us were inseparable for awhile. We used to go to the Twilight Inn Cafe to listen to live acoustic music whenever the whim took us to go there. We ate pancakes.

Once we smiled at the guitarist. I can’t remember which of us did the smiling now, but he came over to our table and talked to us through each of his breaks. He would have been a few years older than us. He had long hair like Garth Porter (from Sherbert). For those of you who are too young or who are not from Australia, this was THE band of the mid-seventies, along with Skyhooks probably (people from Aus will probably argue about that one). Anyway, all of us girls had a crush on at least one of the band members. But I digress, because Steve didn’t look like Garth really (just the hair). He had an alternative arty or hippy look and he spoke in a laid-back yeah, kinda like, sort a monotonic way. I was a science student and took things very literally, so I found him fascinating, even though I didn’t get where he was coming from. Even at the time whenever I was with him I had this behind-the-eight-ball feeling. Huh? (That’s what I was saying in my head when I was listening to him talk). In, on the other hand was sharp, so she helped carry off the conversation on this first meeting.

Why, then, did he ring me and ask me out on a date?

He took me to see Cats! I love dance! I used to do all sorts of dancing – modern, jazz, ballroom, anything, love it. So it wasn’t the activity of the date that was the problem, he was spot on in that respect and I had never been taken to a live show before, it was the conversation in the trendy but low budget Greek Restaurant afterwards.

Now I told you how he made me feel and I was anxious about sitting down face-to-face with this different individual. I watched the cockroaches weaving in and out of the straw paneling on the wall behind him rather than catching his eye. And there was no way I was starting the topic of conversation! We ordered our food. We sat there for awhile, talked small talk about the performance we had just seen. He followed the line of my vision to the cockroaches and said,

Yeah, we have a moth problem in our place at the moment. He was in a shared housing arrangement.

Oh?

Yeah, no matter what we do we can’t get rid of them! They keep popping up, like they’ve laid eggs in the carpet or something…

Oh. I lived at home, so I didn’t have any tips for him. I could actually tell him a thing or two about pest eradication now, but not at the time.

My flat mates want to just spray the area, but I say NO WAY.

Oh?

Ever heard of Karma?

Um? Sad but true, Possums, when I was in my early 20’s I didn’t know what Karma was.

I remember pursuing this line of conversation out of sheer politeness and him laboring over an adequate explanation of Karma, which led to him espousing his spiritual beliefs including Reincarnation. We exhausted the topic and exposed my limited knowledge on these subjects in the process, and the conversation kind of died after that. I felt out of my depth, and to tell you the truth, a bit bored. His laid back voice nearly put me to sleep. As well as that, I started to view him skeptically. His far out explanations of these concepts that were totally new to me made me question his sanity.

I never saw him again (in the context of following up the date). We never went back to the Twilight Inn Cafe either.

Many years later, in my fifth year out as a secondary school teacher, he entered the staff room. He had been teaching instrumental music at the same school! We even worked together on school musicals! He worked with the kids in the band and I did the choreography. After a few years of working together, I found the courage to say, You know, you looked vaguely familiar to me when we first met in the staff room… He just looked fairly blank and shook his head. We both just shrugged our shoulders and got back to work. That was the end of it.

It’s a small world, isn’t it Possums?

PS. I read ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’, and I know what all this stuff is about now. That was during a particular phase I went through in my thirties. I also read ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ and ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’ during that phase… that’s another topic altogether.