Erica's story in 15 minutes

I had an interview Sunday evening with another friend of mine, whom I'll call Erica. Like my interview with Alice, this one turned out to be long, about fifty minutes. This time, though, I tried to sculpt the conversation in a way that made sure to outline something interesting within the first fifteen minutes. I'm going to see how well I did by telling Erica's story two different ways. Today I'll pretend that Erica had to leave after fifteen minutes; I'll write her story based on only that part of the interview. Starting tomorrow I'll tell all fifty minutes of her story, reorganizing the first fifteen to fit the broader narrative. First, though, a technical issue. I've heard now from two of my readers that you've had trouble logging in to comment on the blog. I've now switched to a form of commenting that won't require you to log in. The disadvantage of this system is that the comments section might get spammed; if that becomes a problem I'll have to switch back, but for now commenting should be easy. You can also always write to me at the email address on my business card. Now, without further ado, the short version of Erica's story...

"The whole semester I got the feeling, okay, I really like him, is there something I need to do about this or what, and I waited the whole semester . . . and it never went away, so at the end of the semester I finally told him that that's how I had been feeling."

"So you were thinking maybe there's something there, and you want to explore that?"

"Yeah. I guess I put it in his hands, or something like that."

Erica and I are sitting on a bench outside a hair salon. We talk against a backdrop of traffic noise and chattering pedestrians. Everyone in the shopping center is going somewhere except us. Our travel takes place through memory.

Erica first met her boyfriend, Leonard, in middle school but didn't begin dating him until her fourth year of college. "We dated twice," she explains; the fourth year of college was the first time. I wonder out loud when, in that interval of about nine years, Erica and Leonard realized they had feelings for each other. Erica recalls an email she got in high school -- "it was one of those stupid chain forwards. And one of the questions was, Do you like the person who sent this to you? They were so dumb, but I remember writing something like... I plead the Fifth. 'Cuz Leonard sent it to me and I didn't want to say I like him."

What brings me to attention here is that Erica was given an opportunity to say how she felt, but instead said "maybe, maybe not." We could write this off as typical for high schoolers, but of course adults do it too. It's hard to take action. We pass the buck instead. Erica passed the buck back to Leonard. Leonard wrote something similarly vague back to her. And that is how two teenagers knew and liked each other for nine years before they started dating -- by which time they weren't teenagers anymore.

Erica says affectionately that Leonard "was always a wuss. He wasn't man enough to ever do anything about any girls." He didn't do anything when the two exchanged chain emails; he didn't do anything when he found Erica making out with her then-boyfriend at a Christmas party at Leonard's house. Not that the two were in constant contact. "There were some times when a year or maybe even more went by without us talking," says Erica, "but we could always pick up the phone and talk like no time had gone by."

At last something happened that does not always happen in true stories: someone made the first move. It was Erica. To earn their degrees, Erica and Leonard both needed to take statistics, a subject that was Erica's bane. Erica called him to remind him to sign up for classes -- "cuz he'd always wait till the last minute" -- and suggested that they take the course together. During that semester Erica felt her feelings strengthen, and at the end she told Leonard how she felt about him. "And what did he say?" I ask. "I don't even remember exactly how it happened," she answers. "Basically we both decided, okay, we'll start going out."

There was still more buck-passing to come. Leonard was studying to earn an associate's degree so he could transfer to a college three hours away. He didn't plan on pursuing a long-distance relationship, and he dropped hints about it to Erica but nothing more. The relationship was as full of false ends as it had once been of false starts. It took the intervention of Erica's best friend to force Leonard's hand: "She said, if you're planning on breaking up with her you'd better do it soon, because it's not good of you to string her on like that." Soon afterward, Leonard made the last move, where Erica had made the first. The romance had lasted just three months.

The cliche vision of romance is love at first sight, a chance encounter that leads almost instantly to one person leaping into the other's arms and both whispering "forever." But in real life the first kiss, at least in a potentially serious relationship, is so often a pearl years in the making, its story full of hesitations and ambivalences. So is the last kiss. And that's Erica's story.