Roads Not Taken

Summer 1979. Athens, Georgia.

I'm 5'7" tall, having grown four inches the year before. People clearly thought I was a college student at UGA, not someone's visiting younger sister.

Some poor schmuck WAITED for me to get into my older sister's car, clearly imagining I was about to leave and they would get a parking space. No, I was just sitting there waiting for her for some reason and was mystified why they waited on someone entering a car from the passenger's side.

I was just fourteen. Two potential futures died that year. 

I was visiting my older sister and plotting to take college classes part-time my first year in high school to prove I could handle it in hopes of starting college full-time at UGA at age fifteen. My sister was in on this diabolical plot to help me skip most of high school and was willing to let me live with her and chaperone me.

Had that happened, she likely would have pursued her Master's to stay in school two more years. Maybe her disastrous first marriage wouldn't have happened at all.

I knew her first husband was a creep the second I met him. But I was fourteen, she was twenty and in college, so I assumed she must know something I didn't and I said nothing.

Years later when I was living in Germany in my twenties, I said to her on the phone something like "I've known for some time you feel like a prisoner of your marriage." This was such a shocking epiphany for her, she dropped the phone.

It was the holidays. She waited until they were over to actually file for divorce, but my observation is what led to her divorce in short order.

So if I had moved in with her at age fifteen, it's entirely possible and perhaps even highly likely that I would have soon been telling her to DTMFA.

But our parents nixed the idea of me going to college early. Without their approval, that imagined future was dead before it could possibly begin. 

While visiting her, I met a guy who was my actual first boyfriend. He was a math major. I had already had algebra in eighth grade. I've always been mathy for a girl.

Unlike most of my classmates in school my age, he could talk to me. He took me to the college library and introduced me to computers and was surprised I readily grasped as much as I did.

He taught me to count on my fingers in binary, a somewhat common trick amongst programmers. That was the thing I taught years later at a Beyond IQ conference to little brainiacs to keep them occupied while their parents attended the real conference, my means to get a break on the cost of attending as part of the board of directors of tagfam.org.

It was a real relationship between two people who hit it off. As far as I know, I was the only underaged girl he was involved with.

Some years after my family informed me he was not allowed to see me anymore, ending the relationship suddenly and traumatically, I heard through the grapevine he "Moved to Africa to teach math to savages" promptly upon graduating a few months later.

My parents threatened to get him arrested if he ever contacted me again and blamed my depression in the following months on him, not on the horrific way they ended the relationship. 

It would be another two years before I told my sister that my brother molested me until about four months before I met this young man and she told me mother and etc. But the reality is that the end of the relationship was so traumatic for two reasons:

1. My brother who molested and raped me was at the secret family meeting where this decision to end the relationship was made in my absence. So my abuser had more say in whom I dated than I did.

2. My boyfriend knew I had been molested and simply covered his ass and fled the country as soon as possible rather than trying to extract me from the situation.

He likely told no one. Someone who supposedly loved me knew I had been molested and no police officer or social worker showed up to investigate after he was unjustly run off.

Unlike my brother, he was not pressuring me for intercourse. My rapey brother most likely projected his shitty behavior onto my boyfriend and judged the bf based on how he himself had long treated me until extremely recently.

But the man in question was probably not anyone I needed to marry, actually. I have since chosen my men based on evidence that when the shit hits the fan, I can count on them and I am content with the results of that policy.

Or I have kept it casual and private. I simply don't invite some people into my life merely because we've passed the time pleasantly in some fashion.

After my family chewed him up and spit him out, I dated tougher men, men able to quietly stand up to my family. Men I could count on when the chips were down.

I knew before I slept with him the future ex was such a man. A third road not taken is like a movie plot where timing is everything.

The future ex and I graduated high school together and were also part of the same gaming group. It was a remarkable group of people and we had an intense gaming schedule and regional reputation.

One member was trying to design a new game system and using is as play testers. A guy who moved away came back to game with us periodically when he was in town. A third man traveled to Columbus from about four hours away and stayed in a hotel once a month to participate as much as he could given that he wasn't local.

This man was about ten years older than me and in the military. The evidence suggests he spent some time waiting with bated breath for me to turn eighteen, planning to ask me out at that time only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory when the time came.

I don't know if that meant he was naive or didn't really want me or didn't feel he deserved me or just what. 

I saw him looking at me at his last visit prior to my eighteenth birthday and didn't know what it meant. In the month between that visit and the weekend I turned eighteen and also graduated high school, I began sleeping with the future ex.

This man showed up and was visibly crestfallen at me hanging all over my new boyfriend. Reality, most of the group had no idea there was a recently dumped old boyfriend because of my policy of just not introducing people to my family as my boyfriend and not talking about such things.

He volunteered to do the evening snack run and invited me to go with him, apparently to get the opportunity to speak with me privately and he asked about the relationship. But he asked about it in a fashion that assumed we were serious and which didn't help me say "He's actually still crying on my shoulder about his ex girlfriend being his one true love and making me feel like shit. So I don't know how serious we are, no."

In the last decade or so, I've written and redacted at least a couple of blog posts because it's like that movie Sliding Doors: If one detail had been slightly different, I could have theoretically married someone else.

If he had told me four weeks earlier he was hoping I would have dinner with him when I was eighteen. If he had asked different questions when he obviously and carefully arranged to speak with me privately.

Or if the future ex has been more vocal about not being ready to marry me instead of letting me spend six months telling all our friends we were getting married "because he didn't want to hurt my feelings." And perhaps other minor details I have never thought about that could have clued him that the first six months weren't what they appeared to be.

 

I didn't think much of it at the time because others in the group did the same thing of gallantly stepping aside and respecting that we were a couple. The future ex's best friend whom I had dated previously never made an issue of it. We stayed friends with some of these guys for years and kept in touch after we moved away.

But decades later I've since learned that's not really the norm and plenty of men will try harder to find out if things are not as committed as the polite cover story suggests. Even being married doesn't deter some men who are happy to tell a woman "You're gorgeous, honey. If you're husband isn't making you happy, CALL ME. I'll be your backdoor man."

So I don't really know what was up with that. It's an interesting thought experiment about how one's life path may go one way and not another over seemingly minor details.

My primary takeaway from the relationship I had at age fourteen is that gifted youth need vastly better resources. He was the only male college student I really got to know socially and that was the primary appeal: That unlike my public school classmates, he could really engage me in meaty discussion.

Had I entered college at fifteen or started part-time college at fourteen like I wanted, I might have soon learned there was nothing actually special about him or us. 

The ex is my age but outscored me on the verbal part of the SAT. He reads too fast to benefit from speed reading tips which only slow him down.

I needed someone my intellectual equal and was having trouble finding that. 

The Beyond IQ conference where I was a low level presenter focused on the social and emotional needs of gifted youth. I strongly agree with this agenda and it was primary focus in dealing with my own twice exceptional sons.