Relationship In Love

He Loves His Little Mouse, but He Won’t Take Her Home to Mom

This is a story about a dirty little secret in the dating world. Almost everybody’s been there—on one side or the other.
Two men were sitting at the Princeton Club having drinks. It was late afternoon. Both men were in their early thirties and had once been pretty-boy preppies. They were now losing their looks, and both had an extra twelve pounds around their middles that they couldn’t lose. They’d gone to college together and had moved to New York after graduation. They were good friends; they had the kind of friendship that tends to be unusual for men. They could actually talk about things. Like diets that didn’t work. And women.
Walden had just been made partner in a corporate law firm and had recently gotten engaged to a dermatologist. Stephen had been in a relationship for three years. He was a producer on a network magazine show.
Walden’s financee was out of town at a collagen convention. On his own, Walden always got lonely. It reminded him of a time when he had really been loneyly, for months on end that seemed to drag into years. And it always brought him around to the same memory, of the woman who had made him feel better, and of what he’d done to her.
Walden met her at a party filled with very pretty people. This being Manhattan, she was nicely dressed in a short black dress that showed off breasts that were on the large side. But she had a modest face. Beautiful long black hair, though. Ringlets. “They always have one great feature,” Walden said, and took a sip of his martini.
There was something about this girl, Libby. She was sitting on a couch by herself, and she didn’t seem uncomofortable. Another girl came by, a pretty girl, and she leaned down and whispered something in Libby’s ear, and Libby laughed. But she didn’t get up. Walden was standing by the side of the couch, drinking beer out of the bottle. He was thinking about which pretty girl to approach, looking for opeings. Libby caught his eye and smiled. She looked friendly. He sat down, figuring it was a momentary oasis.
He kept thinking that he was going to get up and approach one of the pretty girls, but he didn’t. Libby had gone to Columbia undergrad, Harvard grad school. She talked to him about law. She told him about her childhood, growing up with four sisters in North Carolina. She was twenty-four and had a grant to make a documentary. She leaned forward and removed a hair from his sweater. “Mine,” she said, and laughed. They talked for a long time. He finished a second beer.
“Do you want to come over to my place?” she asked.
He did. He figured he knew what was going to happen. They’d have sex for one night, he’d go home the next day and fortet about it. Like most men in New York, he made up his mind about a woman right away. Put her in a category—one-night stand, potential girlfriend, hot two-week fling. Back then, he was sleeping with plenty of women, and eventually there would be tearful scenes in his lobby and sometimes worse.
Libby was definitely a one-night stand. She wasn’t pretty enough to date, to be seen in public with.
“But what does that mean, really?” Stephen interrupted.
“I just thought she was uglier than me,” Walden said.
When they got to Libby’s apartment—a basic two-bedroom in a high-rise on Third Avenue that she shared with her cousin—she opened the refigerator and took out a beer. When she bent over in the refrigerator light, he saw that she was a little on the heavy side. She turned around and unscrewed the cap and handed the bottle to him. “I just want you to know,” she said. “I really want to have sex with you.”
A pretty girl wouldn’t have said that, he tought, as he put down his beer and began undressing her. He bit her neck and pulled down the top of her bra withouth unhooking it. He peeled off her pantyhose. She wasn’t wearing underwear. They went into the bedroom.
“I found myself very uninhibited,” Walden said. “Because she wasn’t pretty. The stakes were lower, the emotion higher. There wasn’t any pressure because I knew I couldn’t date her.” He fell asleep with his arms around her.
“The next morning,” Walden said, “I woke up and I felt at ease. Very relaxed. I’d been feeling tormented for some time, and, with Libby, I suddenly felt peaceful. It was the first honest emotional connection I’d had in a while. So I immediately panicked and had to leave.”
“It’s always winter when these things happen,” Stephen said.

“Actual Friends”
Walden didn’t see her again for a few months. He went back to his torment. If she was better-looking, he would have gone out with her. Instead, he waited two months, then he called her for lunch. He’d been fantasizing about her. They had lunch, and then blew off the afternoon and went back to her place and had sex. They began seeing each other a couple of thimes a week. They lived in the same neighborhood; they’d go to local places for dinner or she’d cook. “I found it incredibly easy to talk about my emotions,” Walden said. “I could cry in front of her. I told her my deepest sexual fantasies and we’d act them out. We talked about having a threesome with one of her friends.”
“She’d tell me her fantasies, which were tremendously elaborate,” Walden continued. “She asked me to spank her. She had secrets, but she was incredibly practical. I’ve always wondered if it was because she wasn’t datable that she’d constructed this complicated inner life. You know, if you’re not in the beauty Olympic, you can become a very interesting person.”
In the meantime, Libby was being pursued by, in Walden’s words, “some shlumpy guy.” Walden didn’t feel threatened.
He met all her friends but wouldn’t introduce her to his. He never spent a whole weekend with her—or even a whole day. They never went to a party together. “I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea,” he said.
But she never proteste, never made demands. One time she asked him if the reason he kept her hidden was because she wasn’t pretty enough. “I lied and said no,” Walden said. “You know, if I closed my eyes, there was no way she didn’t satisfy me in every way.”
Walden ordered another drink. “She used to make me wonder if I felt ugly inside, and that was the bond.”
“Well, every man secretly hates pretty girls because they’re the ones who rejected him in high school,” Stephen said. He had a similar story.
Ellen’s grandfather was famous in TV. A real big deal. Stephen met her at a work party. They’d both gone outside on the balcony to smoke cigarettes and started talking. She was funny. A real firecracker, a wiseacre. She was dating somebody else. After that, she and Stephen would run into each other at work event.
“We became actual friends,” said Stephen, “which for me is rare with women. I had no sexual designs on her. I could go out with her and shoot the shit like a guy. She could talk about movies, Letterman, she knew TV—and most women don’t understand TV. If you try to talk about TV with a pretty girl, her eyes glaze over.”
They went to the movie, but “just as friends.” She might have been secretly angling for him; but if she was, Stephen didn’t notice. They’d talk about their relationships. Their dissatisfactions. Stephen was seeing someone who had gone to Europe for three months, and he was writing her forced, unenthusiastic letters.
One afternoon, they were having lunch, when Ellen began describing a recent sexual encounter with her boyfriend. She had given him a hand job using Vaseline. Stephen suddenly popped a woody. “I began to see her as a sexual being,” he said. “The thing about these girls who aren’t beauties—they have to put sex on the table. They can’t nuance it.”
Ellen broke up with her boyfriend, and Stephen began dating lots of women. He would tell Ellen about these women. One night they were at a restaurant, having dinner, and Ellen leaned over and gave him a tongue kiss in his ear that got him thumping his foot.
They went to her place and had sex. “It was great,” Stephn said. “I performed, on an objective basis, better than I had with other women. I was going back for seconds and thirds. I was giving her the forty-five-minute fuck.” The “relationship” progressed from there. They would watch TV in bed and then have sex with the TV on. “A pretty woman would never let you have the TV on during sex,” Stephen said. “But it’s relaxing somehow, with the TV on. You’re not the focus. Women like Ellen allow you to be yourself.”
Stephen admitted that from Ellen’s point of view, their relationship probably wasn’t so great. “During the six months we went out, well, we had probably gone to more movies back when we were friends. Our dates became the worst kind of dates—takeout food and videos. I felt tremendously guilty. I felt shallow. She wasn’t quite up to snuff in the looks department, and I felt shallow for thinking of her looks. She was a great girl.”

Then She Broke
Ellen started in with the pressure. “’When are you going to meet my grandfather,’ she kept asking me. ‘He really wants to meet you.’”
“I wanted to meet her grandfather,” Stephen said. “He was a huge deal. But I couldn’t when you meet someone’s grandparents, it means the relationship is real.”
To solve his problem, Stephen began pimping for Ellen, trying to fix her up with guys. They would talk about guys she could date. One night, Ellen went to a party where she was supposed to meet one of Stephen’s friends. But the guy wasn’t interested in her and she got upset. She went to Stephen’s place and they had sex.
A couple of weeks later, Stephen met a girl, a babe, late one night at a party in a grungy loft in TriBeCa. He introduced her to his parents almost immediately, even though he had none of the kinds of conversations with her that he had with Ellen. He continued to sleep with both girls, taking what he had learned from sex with Ellen and applying it to the new girl. Ellen wanted to hear all about it. What they did. What the new girl was like in bed, what she felt like, what they talked about.
Then she broke. She went to Stephen’s apartment on a Sunday afternoon. They had a screaming fight. She was punching him, “literally raining down punches on me,” Stephen said. She left but called two weeks later.
“We made up on the phone,” Stephen said, “and I went to her house for the usual. But when we got to the crucial moment, she kicked me out of bed. I didn’t get mad at her. I was too angry with myself for that, but I respected her, too. I thought, Good for you.”
Walden put a knee up against the bar. “About six months after I stopeed seeing Libby, she got engaged. She called me and said she was getting married.”
“I was in love with Ellen but I never told her,” Stephen said.
“I was in love, too.” Walden said. “In love in an utterly mundane way.”