A character assassination of two people

A relationship story

No writer should ever, in my opinion, talk about money. It makes everyone feel sad and appalled. Now that we agree on that, let’s talk about money. 

I have turned on paid subscriptions. 

Why have I done this beastly thing? 

1. Instead of pursuing tactical, long-term life things such as finding a compatible partner, pursuing a well paid corporate career or building a relationship with a dog that will never leave me, I am spending a minimum of 40 hours on an essay that will eventually be published here. 

2. I would like to, one day, get paid for my writing and this is the start of making that happen. 

Now, after reading this, you might be tempted to call the Samaritan helpline on my behalf. I already called them once last year and was put on hold. So, if you ask me, this is not worth your time. Instead, however, you can, if you feel my writing is worth reading, donate the $5 amount monthly. 

If you can’t afford this, please do not worry. 

That is all I wished to say. Thanks for reading.

 ……………………………..

This is part I of a III part essay.

I know very well what started it all. It was his damn honesty. We went for coffee on our first date except there was no coffee because I was too cheap to owe him a cup of coffee, and he was too cheap to get himself a coffee so we sat there with two plastic cups of water at a round table, staring into different directions of the open space of the Pleasance Dome. 

We were both terribly nervous like two rabbits shaking at opposite sides of a cage, waiting to be dropped into a French stew at any moment.

I hadn’t been on a date for 5 years, and he, apparently, hadn’t asked anyone out for 4 years. 

He was sweating through his shirt, his veined arms stretched out and tapping obsessively on the table, and I was sweating through my top, leaned back in my chair, balancing on the balls of my feet. When his arms stretched out onto the table and moved closer to me, I leaned back instinctively and the chair gave in to gravity. I remember thinking mid-air, a second or two before hitting the ground that I could not believe this was happening. 

I broke the fall with my elbows, and then lay stretched out on the floor. I looked up and found him sitting there, covering his mouth with a clasped hand, like a squirrel taken by surprise. It was odd. I had not seen a man do that before.

I got up with an air of exasperated stillness as if I was in bed and my alarm just went off.

‘Are you alright?’ he asked. 

‘Yep, all good.’

How much more dreadful could this get? 

‘At least now, we have something to talk about’, I said as I sat back down. 

He laughed a high-pitch laugh whilst I massaged my sore elbows. I mused that I was getting to know this man too quickly for the inner workings of romance to take place. 

He either shook like a rabbit, startled like a squirrel or laughed like a hyena. 

Next, he wanted to talk about comedy and I didn’t want to talk about comedy because 3 people had just shown up to my show that day and so instead, we talked about everything that was wrong with him and everything that was wrong with me, and that single topic relaxed the living socks out of me. And it relaxed the living socks out of him too, he told me later. 

Every bone in my body fell limp to the embrace of the chair. Luckily, we didn’t run out of material very soon.

‘So, what do you mean by that? You get distracted?’

‘It’s all sorts of things. I forget things, meetings, appointments, deadlines. Then I’m late for things a lot of the time. And then there’s all the other distractions.’

The whole thing was a marvelous trick. We were no longer two people on a date. We were two patients in a mental hospital in the midst of a team building exercise, except there was no paper plate of biscuits to take the edge off. 

Then he told me about his depression. There was no guardedness, no resentment. He was just telling me a story where he happened to be the main character and the generosity overwhelmed me. 

What can I say? I could nearly hear the walls tumble down from within my feeble female chest. 

Other men were silhouettes, projections, stoic expressions with the aim to conceal but Hans was as real as the suffering on his face. The veins and skin on his hands shone with the brutal mortality of Roman portraiture. He was like the last man on earth, carrying the burden of human existence on his shoulders, one step at a time. 

‘So you fall in love with a man because he’s in pain and his veins pop out?’ Norma said. 

I once again remind myself to recruit friends who were not ruthless comedians. 

Was it strange to fall in love with a man because he tells you that 5 years ago when he traveled through Asia alone, he came to terms with the futility of life and got diagnosed with severe depression? 

I suppose it’s the distinction that got me. Other men worked to conceal whilst Hans parades his biggest fallacies out in front of me, one by one, and, quite frankly, it was irresistible.

Perhaps I belonged to the class of women who liked their men with a dash of suffering. I suppose that explained it. 

Show me a man rattling his bottle of antidepressants and I start drooling like Pavlov’s dogs.

There was something astoundingly simple in our relationship. He said things, and I believed him. When Hans said that he missed a sound cue because he was thinking about me, or when he said he felt like he could be himself with me, and he hadn’t felt like that with anyone else, I believed him. 

When we held hands, a silence descended upon me. We could be sitting in a busy pub with shouting and chatter around us, and as long as he was holding my hand, I couldn’t hear a thing. We were like two kids in a abandoned island.

Hans was not the sort of man who played it cool, and he didn’t see apologies as an exchange of power in a relationship, a quality I had not witnessed in a man. He was as generous in his expressions of regret as he was in his affection, often going further than he needed. 

‘Let’s move on now.’, I would say, when he had already apologised a few times. 

‘I’m just…I didn’t want…the last thing I wanted was to upset you.’

As the relationship went on, Hans continued to surprise me. In fact, he started to disprove most of my assumptions about relationships. 

I used to have a theory that the quickest way to cool your feelings  and cut your attachment to a man you’re dating was to catch said man in the simple act of running. 

The theory was straightforward really. A man who was fully equipped with the task of a run loses full control of his body, giving way to hidden and repressed personality traits, usually kept  under wraps. In short, you could watch a man running and catch a glimpse of his most fatal character flaw, saving yourself an awful lot of time and trouble. 

A pompous stroll, the placid, distant smile of an idiot, the dictator-esque tilt of the brow, the intrusive elbow. 

I could fall in love with a man and stay in love with him as long as he never ran in front of me. 

Of course, when you’re dating a man like Hans who is constantly running late for things, it is very nearly impossible not to catch a glimpse of him running. 

We were only on our third date when he checked his watch, exclaimed a profanity, then kissed my cheek, and ran the opposite way, late for work, no doubt. I turned around to have a look. Then I regretted having a look. His legs moved not straight ahead but stretched out to the sides like a ballerina sweeping the floor and on every few steps, there was a small skip, an odd frolick, for no apparent reason that I could tell. 

Meanwhile, his elbows popped out sideways, alternating as if he was plowing a field. There was a manic synchronicity to it which made it impossible to stop watching. Left, right, left, right. 

I was entranced in my staring but I was not, to my surprise, appalled.

I had been appalled by the run of every man I had ever dated, and yet, I looked at Hans running and I thought  that there was no greater sign of his genuine nature than this gagged-up, ridiculous clown charade of a run. 

Southbridge was one of the longest streets in old town Edinburgh and I watched him for several minutes until he staggered manically out of sight. 

His run had reminded me of something but I did not know what until I reached the end of my stroll home. It was the run of Forrest Gump. 

I loved watching Forrest  Gump as a child. I watched it  so many times, it was no wonder that the run looked familiar. I remember gazing into Tom’s face as a 9 year old and thinking that when I grow up, I would find a kind, goodhearted man just like Forrest. 

Was that really what hooked me? Was that really what my relationship with Hans was about? It was about Tom Hanks?

His run shouldn’t have surprised me. Hans was a clumsy man, constantly spilling coffee on himself, forgetting bags, train tickets, and always running late for something. 

On our 4th date, I waited for him on the first floor of Blackwells bookshop. He said he’ll be there in 20 minutes, and he showed up after an hour and a half.

I found a sun-cloaked  armchair next to the Russian classics section and fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon like a homeless person.

‘Well, that isn’t really his biggest problem!’ my friend Norma said, referring to his tardiness.