Abandonment

(30 March 2002)

The first man I met from the online dating site was Michel, he was listed under my zip code, which made him geographically desirable, but it turned out that he lived alone in a house in the mountains, kilometres away from the nearest town.  He used the Paris zip code in order to get more responses.  We began to dialogue a lot by net, and then to call each other each night for about two months.  I was so happy; it took away the loneliness that had been hitting me hard in the evenings.  We shared stories of our lives, joked and laughed a lot, sometimes he’d play a piece of music that he’d just downloaded and was excited about.

Michel’s story was that he’d been with a woman for six years, and taken the break up badly.  He went into a depression, and slept around with young women right and left.  Finally he consulted a psychologist.  She ended up telling him that he just had a depression that was normal after a break up, it would go away with time, he didn’t have any real problems, and there was nothing she could do for him.  The more I talked with him, the more I suspected that she was wrong, or more likely, was up against something she didn’t want to deal with.

Once when I called him at home there was no answer, so I called his mobile phone.  The man who answered sounded so much like Michel, that I didn’t believe him when he insisted he wasn’t.  The man laughed and laughed.  I was absolutely certain that I had dialled the correct cell phone number.  I panicked.  “That’s it!  He’s decided to cut me off, just like that!”  I called back his home number and left a message, trying to cover over my panic.  But he picked up on it of course, so I tried to downplay it, knowing that that’s the sort of thing which will send a man running.

(15 June 2002)

When Michel finally got a chance to come up toParis, he came by for dinner.  I put on lots of different kinds of music for him to listen to, and we had an enjoyable relaxed conversation.  Then he stretched out on my bed like a beached jelly fish, and asked what I was going to do with him!  I was a little disconcerted, never having had a potential sexual partner who wanted me to do all of the work.  My solution was to give him a blow job and then get on top, after some effort, I gave up, it just didn’t feel like it was going anywhere–he wasn’t responsive.  He obviously couldn’t handle having sex.

(17 June 2002)

Michel has been spending evenings at his sister’s, and in the days he walks around Paris looking for young women to try to pick up, then gave me reports of all of the sexy young women he’d spotted.  After being in the countryside, he was like a child in a candy store.  I teased him: “Why bother looking so hard, when you wouldn’t be able to do anything with a woman even if you succeeded in picking her up?”  He didn’t mind my teasing.

(18 June 2002)

Yesterday we stopped by a bakery to get lunch before setting out on a walk.  We were eating in a nearby park, where there were a group of children playing with a nanny watching on.  Suddenly he got up and walked away, saying: “I’ll be right back.”  I started to freak out.  “Where could he be going?  We bought plenty to eat.  He’s abandoned me.”  I closed my eyes, relaxed my shoulders, and breathed slowly and shallowly to avoid hyperventilating.  I thought through all that I’ve learned in psychoanalysis about my fear of abandonment.  “There’s no reason for him to disappear.  And where would he go anyway?  He hasn’t even finished eating.  He said he’d be right back.  If he really doesn’t come back, it’s okay, because someone who would do that doesn’t belong in my life.”  I relaxed and finished my lunch.

He soon returned, walked up to a little girl who was standing by herself, and gave her a pain au chocolate.  As he sat back down on the bench, he observed: “The nanny wasn’t paying any attention to the children.  She just kept running back and forth to the bakery to buy them sweets, several times she was gone for fifteen minutes.  I was surprised to see such a little girl arrive alone.  She didn’t have anyone to play with.  She was just standing there watching the other children I got something for her so she wouldn’t feel left out.”  I looked at the little girl more intently than before, remembered when I was a child standing and watching the other children play, wanting to make friends but not knowing how, and pretending to myself that I preferred to be alone.

Meeting Michel put an end to our long distance friendship, but in a way I didn’t mind: it couldn’t have continued like that forever, it was time to move on.

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