This piece was written in February of 2018, about two and a half years before I started this blog (and about two years into my post-marriage life, although just one year after the divorce became official). Nevertheless, it feels like an appropriate inaugural entry for my new blog.
I seem to have entered a stage in my processing of the unwanted end of my marriage in which I find myself reflecting back on the relationship’s beginnings a lot. I suppose that, in part at least, it’s about a need to get my head around the shift from a situation in which this relationship was the central fact of my life (and was going to be that indefinitely), to the new reality that it was one thing, one (very long) chapter, that has a beginning and an ending, and that fits in some new way into an emerging larger picture. I think my therapist once called it “redefining the shape of the relationship.” I expect that’ll be an ongoing process, and thinking about its beginning is likely just a tiny first step. So, I’m not setting out here to do anything as ambitious as redefining anything for myself; rather, I just have one story that I need to put on paper. And the story that I have in mind is, perhaps, not even the most obvious one. I referred in my opening sentence to “beginnings” (plural), because there are arguably several from which to choose: The story of how we decided to get married, and what our wedding was like? Or the real start of our “life together,” a year earlier, when we first moved into a shared residence? The tale of how we got to know each other, became a couple, fell in love? Or of how we actually met? There are stories in each of these beginnings. But the story that I seem to keep coming back to, recently, is one that comes before any of these, and belongs to a time before we had ever so much as laid eyes on each other. It’s the events of the evening of Thursday, October 22nd, 1992 that I have been feeling compelled to write about.
The evening in question was a fateful one (I had no idea how much so!), and its events represent the intersection of multiple stories in my life—so that what this evening meant to me at the time, and what it means now, are two very different things. But it was also a very ordinary evening, and my story revolves around nothing any more remarkable than two people sitting in a college dorm room and talking…and then, later, letting talk give way to other things. And although this happened a couple weeks before Jen and I even met, it is, ultimately, the starting point of a bigger story about how we came to meet. In retrospect, it has always seemed as though strange forces conspired, during these weeks, not only to ensure that we would meet, but to orchestrate the circumstances such that it would happen only when I was ready for it, so that a more magical thinker than I might easily reach the conclusion that our meeting and subsequent relationship were “fated” or “meant to be.” For instance, two wholly independent sequences of events were vying, at this time, to introduce the two of us to each other (as I will probably touch on at the end of this story). The events of October 22nd kicked off one of these two sequences.
Okay…let’s establish some overall context for my story. It was the fall of my freshman year of college, at the University of Minnesota’s small liberal arts campus in the rural western MN town of Morris. I was three weeks shy of my 19th birthday, and sharing a dorm room with the person who had been my best friend since we were 14, though for the past three years we’d lived in different towns and gone to different schools. Also with us in Morris was my girlfriend of about a year, who had likewise not lived in my town or gone to my school—so ours had been a long-distance relationship until about a month before the evening to be recounted here. Going off to college, for me, was not about saying good-bye to high school friends as much as it was about reuniting and/or entering a new chapter in which I actually got to see them every day, which felt exhilarating and liberating. Be that as it may, however, this evening is also a part of the story of the end of my relationship with the aforementioned girlfriend (whose name, confusingly enough, was Jenny).
Some additional important background information that needs to be related concerns aspects of the common social/academic world that we all, as new freshmen at UMM, inhabited. All incoming freshmen had to take a course that first term called Inquiry, which was sort of meant to introduce new college students to critical thinking and substantive discussion and awareness of the larger world around us. Sections of this course were taught by professors from a wide variety of disciplines, probably each in his or her own very different way. But back in July, when we’d all come to UMM for a weekend event intended for registering for fall courses and getting a first taste of what campus life would be like when our college experience started in a few months, there had been one particular “rock star” professor who had addressed us all, told us about the Inquiry course (doubtless among other things), and generally made a vivid impression on most of us incoming freshmen (or at any rate, on me and my friends) as “the cool professor.” Getting into Professor W.’s inquiry class had become something of a holy grail for some of us. My girlfriend, Jenny, managed it, but she was the only one. Fast forward a couple months to when school actually started, and it turned out that Professor W. also hosted weekly Thursday evening gatherings of students (and a few other faculty members) at his home, which was an easy few minutes’ walk from campus (as, let’s face it, pretty much everything in Morris was). The gatherings were forums for discussing politics and philosophy and campus life, making connections, building community—that sort of thing. Word of them was spread, I think, largely through the people in his Inquiry course, so Jenny was sort of my “ticket” into this amorphous circle, and these gatherings became a part of the slowly expanding social world that my friends and I were exploring as our college experience got under way.
Finally, October 22nd was two nights after Jenny had told me that she wanted to break up with me. Despite what I said about how exhilarating it was to actually have her in my everyday life for the first time, it’s also true that things had been a bit rocky, off and on, since the latter part of the summer, and after a fairly silly argument that we’d had over the previous weekend, we’d met on the Tuesday evening of this week to (I thought) smooth things over and make up…but instead, she’d broken the news that she “needed a break.” It was maybe not “for good,” she said (and I clung to that for dear life), and though I was stunned and thrown for a loop, she was kind about it, and very much still wanted to be friends. As events would unfold, this would prove to be merely the relatively benign opening salvo in what became a drawn-out, muddled, and very painful breakup. Still, at the time, of course, I was pretty devastated. And so, two days later, I was hardly in a state of mind to feel much like putting in an appearance at the weekly gathering at Professor W.’s house, where I’d have to be social and sort of “normal”—and where, of course, Jenny would be part of the crowd. So I didn’t go. But as noted, I was very much hoping that this breakup thing would prove just a blip that we could soon smooth over, so talking one-on-one with her was a whole different prospect for me than hanging out in a larger social setting that included her—and as the events of this night would prove, she wasn’t quite as ready to let go of me as she thought, either. And of course, we’d agreed that we were still friends. So, whether by prearranged plan or in more of an impromptu way I don’t remember, but one way or another it transpired that after Jenny returned from Professor W.’s house on this evening, she and I found ourselves alone in her dorm room, sitting on her bed and conversing.
I recall the conversation as pleasant and emotionally intense, despite (or maybe in part because of) the awkward context. It felt like talking to Jenny had always felt, except with some added weirdness. Toward the end of the conversation, we even talked explicitly about this. Prior to that, our talk must have touched on a variety of topics, but one in particular is memorable (and was much more significant for me than I could know at the time). It seemed that there was this girl in Jenny’s Inquiry class, also named Jennifer (or “Jen”), who had been at Professor W.’s on this evening and whom Jenny had found intriguing. (As an aside, I would eventually learn—if I didn’t hear about it on this night—that there were something like four Jennifers/Jennys/Jens in their inquiry class. Turns out, it was the #1 most popular girl’s name in the US for babies born in the early-to-mid 70s, so this experience was not especially novel in 1992 for Jennifers of my approximate age. Another friend of mine, visiting us all in Morris frequently that fall and meeting various people in our social milieu, once memorably commented—quite crassly, it must be said, though it greatly amused me—that one “couldn’t piss in a circle without hitting an ‘Amy'” on campus…and I suppose the same could have been said about Jennifers.) Anyway, this other Jen was, from Jenny’s description, a very quiet, shy person who rarely spoke up in class, and thus hadn’t particularly attracted Jenny’s notice prior to tonight. But it must have been a somewhat smaller gathering at Professor W.’s tonight, with the mood rather more focused and calm than I remember it usually being; something, at any rate, made the circumstances right for this Jen to speak up and share the gist of a self-reflective journal entry that she had recently written with the group that had assembled there.
In this reflection, Jen had sketched out a metaphor comparing herself to a turtle. A turtle, of course, has a protective shell that keeps it safe from potential threats in its environment. When it is scared, or startled, or finds itself in a new and unfamiliar situation, it can pull itself entirely—head, arms, legs, and tail—inside that shell, and hide from the big scary world. And doing this keeps it safe. But it can’t live inside its shell all the time; it still has to deal with the outside world to meet its various needs. So, at times, it pokes its head out, checks to see if it looks safe out there, and risks a degree of exposure in order to find food, or a good basking spot, or even a mate. Jen, of course, had been poking her head out of her shell in the act of sharing this metaphor with a group of relative strangers at Professor W.’s house—and in a larger sense, it was what she was doing by being at UMM in the first place. Jen described herself, at this time, as someone who was terrified of other people, but who also felt a powerful, urgent, compelling need for them. (Whether she said this to the group at Professor W.’s house that night or not, I don’t know—but she said it to me many times later on.) She had also been discouraged by her father from “going away” to college, but had chosen—despite profound fears that she would not be able to “make it” away from home on her own—to defy him and go anyway. And she had purposely chosen a school that was both too far from home for frequent visits or a lot of parental involvement, and a place that none of her high school friends were going, so that she would be forced “out of her shell,” and have no choice but to overcome her fears, make her own way, connect with new people, and grow beyond herself. Pretty brave. Unsurprisingly, a month into her new college life, she had thus far not ventured much beyond the fact of being there; she was quiet, kept to herself, had a dorm mate with whom she wasn’t connecting, was pretty alone and unsure of herself. But she was still dedicated to growing, and her reflections on this had led her to conceive this turtle metaphor and write this journal entry—and then, almost incredibly, to share it with a group of near strangers.
I could not know, of course, that in relating this all to me, my semi-ex-girlfriend was providing me with my first awareness of the existence of the person whom I would eventually marry. But the same things that had piqued Jenny’s interest when she’d heard Jen talk about her turtle metaphor for herself were now tripping all of my own “this sounds like my kind of person, and someone I’d like to meet and get to know” flags. It wasn’t just the creativity, or the self-reflectiveness, or the combination of relatable vulnerability and admiral emotional courage, though these were all important ingredients in the mix. But my friends and I…we had all been, to one degree or another, outcasts and misfits and loners in high school—the brainy kids, the awkward kids, the nerdy kids, some of us even the bullied kids—and all sensitized by our various experiences to issues of belonging (or not), connection (or its absence), acceptance (or rejection). This was a conscious and explicit part of our identity as a friend group, for which we even had a name that reflected it: we called ourselves the United Loners. And this Jen person, it seemed to both Jenny and me, was a kindred spirit, and would fit very naturally into our circle. Plus, she just seemed like someone who thought in interesting ways, and would be worth getting to know. So, in short, I took away from this conversation the hope that I would meet this Jen (perhaps at a future Thursday evening gathering), and that she might be a potential new friend.
Thus, the first things that I ever knew about the person to whom I would end up being married for over twenty years were that she was shy, creative, emotionally aware, brave…and interested in turtles. No one knew that her journal entry, and the act of relating it to others on this night, would become such a defining story about Jen, leading to turtles becoming a sort of lifelong personal symbol for her, and eventually even prompting her to suggest a pet tortoise to her husband (who first heard of her because of the journal entry) as a gift for her on her 34th birthday. If I had no idea, on this night, that I had just learned about my future wife, I had even less of an inkling that I would one day come, through her, to develop an enormous fondness for turtles and tortoises of my own—nor that this fondness would actually outlast, in the end, our then-future relationship. But it’s true that I am the happy owner of my four adorable Russian tortoises today as a result of a long chain of events that I can trace back to October 22nd, 1992. Sussing out deeper meanings in those other “first things” that I knew about Jen before I even met her, and how they may, or may not, have foretold things about our relationship-to-be or its eventual end, is beyond my ambitions right now, except to say that my instincts were dead on: she was definitely “my kind of person,” and meeting and getting to know her would be one of the most worthwhile things that would ever happen to me.
Of course, on this night, I was not yet ready for any of that; I was still much too caught up in the semi-ex-girlfriend. Inevitably, our talk that night turned to the subject of what it felt like to be sitting there talking, two days after our theoretical breakup. We were connecting, and it felt so much like similar conversations in the past…except there was no physical contact between us, which felt very strange, and which we both acknowledged missing. And the next thing I knew, there was a hungry look in her eyes that I recognized, and she sort of feebly—maybe sheepishly—said something about “one last time,” which I felt sort of hurt and even demeaned by, but I half-consciously chose not to take it seriously or let myself care, and then we were making out. We did not have “actual” sex (we never did), but things did happen that night that hadn’t happened before, and of course, I let myself think that this meant something, despite her having pretty explicitly communicated that it didn’t (“one last time,” after all), so that when, in the days that followed, it became clear that it hadn’t, I got angry and defensive, and here lies the path to the next stages of that drawn-out and painful breakup process that I mentioned earlier…which is, to be sure, another story. Like I said, multiple stories intersected in the events that went down in Jenny’s dorm room on this fateful Thursday night.
I wasn’t any more ready for what the future had in store when, just over a week later, events unrelated to Jenny almost caused Jen’s and my paths to cross for the first time, but events very much related to Jenny prevented it from happening. My best friend and roommate had recently befriended a girl named Becca. Becca was a clarinetist and had joined band at UMM. Jen, unbeknownst to Jenny or me, was also a clarinetist, was also in the band, and sat next to Becca, and the two of them had also started to become friends. Over Halloween weekend, my friends and I left town and got together with a big group of our friends from high school (many of whom were a year or two younger than us and thus still in high school). Meanwhile, Becca had been trying to talk a reluctant, turtle-like Jen into letting herself be dragged to the dorm room of these two guys she knew (my friend and me) and be introduced. That Sunday, it seems, she was waiting for us to return from out of town (walking by our building and watching for light to appear in our window) so she could greet us, and drag Jen along with her. Meanwhile, during this weekend with friends, the ice thawed between Jenny and me, and then an intense, white-knuckled drive back to Morris through a snowstorm and the attendant incredibly dangerous road conditions—with me driving, Jenny in the passenger seat providing moral support, and other friends mostly asleep in the back seat—had left the two of us feeling very connected, as well as just in a really different head space from the others. So, when we finally made it back safely, I headed over to her dorm room with her to decompress together. Nothing any racier than one very (and I mean very) intense kiss transpired, but the whole experience did reset us to a sort of (unexamined and undefined) couplehood status for a while. More immediately, though, it also meant that when Becca spotted that light in the window and dragged Jen with her up to our dorm room that night, I wasn’t there, so what might have become our first meeting didn’t happen (and I, of course, would only learn about this “near miss”—and the coincidence of it involving Jenny’s turtle-metaphor Jen, whom I was already quite interested in meeting—later on).
The tale of how we did eventually meet, not even a week after that Sunday, and of what happened afterwards, is—once again—another story, and definitely interesting in its own right. But in a very real sense, in my mind, the earliest beginning between Jen and me belongs to that weird, intense, and fateful night of October 22nd, and to the events that made it possible…including, notably, one person’s decision to share something personal about herself with a bunch of strangers.