...and so it begins

Life as I know it is about to change (and stay the same). By mutual assent, Melody and I are now officially an Us. How we got to that decision is as amazing as everything else about her has been. It's worth a story.

Jane has a lot of things to work out in her life, and while I can be supportive of it all, I can't be part of it. I spent most of yesterday afternoon thinking about it, and realized that she and I are just not at the same spot in our lives, and I can't go backwards to meet up with where she is. Damn me, I want someone whose life is more fully-formed, more under their own control, where they have a stable base to go forward from. I just can't see that in Jane, and while I wish I had met her years ago, well... I didn't. And if I'm being cold-eyed about it, there's a whole roomful of women I wish I'd met years ago (and didn't), and if she was added to that room, she'd still be waiting a while.

No, what I realized yesterday was that Melody was the one I wanted. I had probably known that from the day her Match profile fell into my inbox. To distract myself from that was to make only a half-assed effort at showing her that she was not only wanted, but needed, and, to quote Michael Jackson, "I'm not like other guys."

We were supposed to talk yesterday afternoon. Jane had gone off on her journey home, and I was watching golf, of all things. Before you go thinking I've gotten old and soft in the head, be advised that I had money on this Masters Tournament, and thus watched with unusual attention. Earlier than expected, the phone rang, and it was Melody.

In an email that morning, I had mentioned that I would rather talk in person, because her voice is so soft sometimes it gets lost in the line noise on her cordless phone. "Are you sure it's not just that you want a kiss?" she asked me. Actually, that wasn't what I was primarily thinking about -- I really did want to talk seriously -- but since she brought it up, I figured it was on the table.

As it turned out, her early afternoon had been taken up with meeting a guy we'll call Bob for a tour of exhibitions at the National Gallery and lunch. "His picture must be 20 years old," she said, disappointed. Coupled with her disappointment in another guy she had met on Friday evening ("he's 53 but looks 60."), she was planning on canceling her subscriptions to online dating. I got down there, and we talked for hours, then got Chinese food and had dinner, and then talked some more.

She had apparently originally had a date with yet another guy, a guitar player we'll call Gene, but called to cancel it because doing the museum thing in the rain had made her tired and cranky. She had been tiring of Gene in general for some time and planned not to see him as anything more than a friend henceforth. So, of the four other guys I knew her to be interested in, one was in Cleveland, two were washouts, and one guy was being promoted to "platonic friend."

That left... me.

The watershed came late in the evening, when we were lying around on her newly-made bed talking to her cats and talking about our respective lives. I was telling her a story from the late days of my marriage, and she stopped me at one point and asked, innocently enough, "how long has it been since you slept with someone?"

I thought about it for a moment, and realized that there was no way I was going to lie to this woman about anything.

"Ummm... a day," I told her. She looked at me.

"A day? So, your houseguest this weekend..."

I nodded, and she started to cry.

That was pretty much all she really had to say. I knew everything. It all came together. She had tapered off meeting anyone new, stopped seeing anyone old, and had opened herself and her life up to me very deliberately. She had already chosen me, but the only thing she'd forgotten to do was to actually tell me that that was her plan. And she was devastated that I was sleeping with someone else, as if I was being unfaithful to her even before she'd asked me to be faithful to her.

"Do you want that commitment?" I asked her. She nodded.

"Then you have it," I told her. And I meant it.

If she'd only told me a couple of days earlier, I'd have been able to head things off with Jane and avoid hurting Melody unintentionally. But -- and this is a very important thing I saw -- she did not, as my ex-wife and many ex-girlfriends have done or would have done, choose to penalize me anyway for my failure to acquire the skill of mind-reading. She understood that she hadn't actually voiced a desire to be The One in my life and to have me as The One in hers, and while she didn't identify with my desire to sleep with people I wasn't necessarily in love with, she knew that she and I are different, and thought it out.

We talked and talked, and finally came to a question: are we an Us?

We both nodded, and so... we were an Us.

She asked me to stay the night. And no, we did not have sex. It might have been one of the best nights of my life.

I've spent today taking down my online profiles from the various online dating sites, canceling subscriptions, and babbling about this new development to anybody stupid enough to stop and listen to me. I must sound like the first person ever to fall in love with someone because it seemed right, not because it sucked less than the other options. I assure you, I am not, and am quite conscious of my sickeningly sappy state of mind... so, fuck all of you... I am HAPPY.

Sometimes things actually work out the way they should, the way you want, and the way that's best. And sometimes all three of those states occur in the same place in time and space. And for once, they have occurred to ME.

Much less sex will appear in this set of pages henceforth, partly because until Melody decides we're going to make love, I won't be doing any of that, and partly because... well... I don't want to tell tales about someone I really care about who has asked me not to.

I am the world's biggest wuss.