With online dating, I’ve found the frequency of misunderstanding to pervade the relationship. Take, for example, my brief relationship with the Banker. She was the last woman I met when I was actively looking for my One and Only. I fell for her the moment I saw her profile picture. And really, I’m not a shallow person by nature, but the tendency with dating sites is to fall for their selective imagery first, their selective biography second, and then make up a personality for them, one that suits the qualities you want. And in her, I gave her all the qualities I wanted.

The Banker and I chatted through the site, then through instant messaging, and finally e-mail. It was there that the relationship would end, but not before we met in person one evening. Continued…

Somehow I’d become friends with the German exchange student; friends enough that we were talking on the phone and somehow hours had gone by. She no longer enjoyed talking to her boyfriend, she said.

There were times between us, often during our Wednesday spare, when things were tense. I knew she liked me. She told me so.

I asked her why she was with her boyfriend if she no longer cared for him.

Her English was unusually shaky when she said that I didn’t understand.

And so was mine, when I told her she was probably right.

She came over one night, upset. I rushed around anxiously tidying up my things. The place was a mess. Still. The day before I was staying in to clean, but I became distracted by something that took the entire evening. Only she knew what was going to happen.

I was feeling differently about distractions then. My nights were often filled with them and hardly with her. Everything was unusual. I’d stepped into a shape I thought emotions should fit into, but I wouldn’t admit the shape wasn’t my own.

When she told me she was leaving that night, I did not want her to go. Both our minds had been wandering for some time, distracted. Only she knew. My room was so cluttered then.

When I was seventeen or so, I developed feelings for someone that did not feel the same way towards me. From what I’d learned in television and movies, it was the duty of the man to woo her with gifts of affection and romance. So my plan was this: I would drive out to her acreage in the middle of the night and leave her gifts on her doorstep each day of the week. Each gift was accompanied by a poem that I’d chosen for her, faux-aged with tea, rolled up, and tied with a nice red ribbon.

On Tuesday morning, she found a teddy bear. On Wednesday, a necklace. Thursday was chocolates and on Friday, there was just a note. It said to be at the end of her driveway at noon. Driving out to her home that day with a dozen roses on the seat beside me, I was as happy and hopeful as I’d ever been.

When I gave them to her, she lied. At the time, I thought she was being honest when she said she didn’t want to date anyone. But later that night I found out that she started seeing someone later that day. I’d given her all these gifts that were expressions of how I truly felt, and she gave me the gift of insincerity. Months later, she tried to take it back. I’d already lost it.

One day back in January, I wanted something to read, so I went to a nearby book store. There was a woman working there that I saw when I walked in. Beautiful dark hair, a smile so full it must have contained everything. Me, I was dressed poorly. Clothes I’d pulled out of the laundry, unshowered, my favourite sweat-stained cap. I walked around that store for a while trying to find the right book, hoping to time it so that she would be working at the register when I went to pay. I wanted to ask her for tea, for coffee, for anything. Instead, I paid her and left. I planned to return there another time when I was more presentable.

She was not there the next time I returned. But now, several months later and through completely unrelated circumstances, we’ve had tea. And as fate would have it, it was her that asked me.

While sitting here writing this entry, my pyjamas bottoms have worked their way half-way up my legs. This reminded me of something.

A woman I was seeing years ago mentioned that my pyjamas were too short for me. I never thought much of it since, really, who ever sees them but me? That woman turned out to be a conflicting personality that I had overlooked in my lustful trance. Several months later, I met another woman that I became deeply rooted in. At one point she mentioned the same thing about my pyjamas, that they were too small. Please, reader, keep in mind that “too small” doesn’t mean much other than they rose slightly over my ankles. But yet, that was enough to have it pointed out twice.

Later in the course of our relationship, after she’d had more than her share of trivial quarrels, I finally noticed the incredible similarity between these two women. I hadn’t noticed before because she kept herself more subdued. But when the dam burst, we drowned, and now it’s hard to tell them apart.

For some reason, any time I’m in the States, I think of her. Someone I met in a chat room in 1997, someone that I stayed in contact with until nearly 2002. We only ever had at best one conversation per month, sometimes nothing for several months. But we remained in contact and in each other’s lives. The last time we chatted, I helped her win the object of her affection’s heart. She was going to give up, but I wouldn’t let her. I convinced her that she was misperceiving his actions. Last year, I sent her an e-mail – as brief as our communication ever was – and she replied that indeed, they were still together. When I met her, she lived in Ohio; and the last time I heard from her, she’d moved. I never heard where, so every time I’m in the States, I hope I might run into her. So we can smile as we pass by.

Someone once told me that she knew exactly what she stood for, although she was never standing at all. What she said and what she did never quite mixed properly, and there was always something I could never understand trickling out. Accusations and assumptions and aggression that flared from embers. Beliefs that wavered as they concerned her and an unwillingness to see what she didn’t want to see. It was all so selectively volatile, as though she needed a chord vibrating constantly in disharmony to remind her what music sounded like. By the end I had to realize the truth from what she was never going to say. And I still remember the music that moved us; me to dance and her to walk away.

Long before I fell for her, I had myself figured out. I stood by my values firmly, defending them even as they caused relationships friction. After that, I reconsidered what I believed and the degree to which I valued it.

One cold winter, we traveled somewhere hot together. It was in this place far from home that I found inner conflict. Months earlier, I refused to go to the zoo with a woman I was seeing. She found this intolerable, just as she found my choice not to eat animals intolerable. Continued…