Somebody From The Internet (6/?) - “Serious Business”
Content Warning: This story involves some adult situations, albeit presented in an SFW context.
A noted Boston-area hospital - February 2018
"You really should reach out to her," my therapist suggested to me. "It seems like you have a lot of overall trust issues stemming from Courtney that you need to resolve to move forward. Do you have a means to contact her?"
"I have her old phone number saved away somewhere, and I could go and see if she's on Facebook, I know she has been on and off there several times," I responded with an anxious tone to my voice. The treatment methods of my therapist, a recent psychology grad stationed at one of the most prestigious hospitals in the world, could be seen as a bit off-the-wall, but it can be argued that said hospital did not get the groundbreaking reputation that it has earned through nearly two decades by being conventional. I had some vague idea of what had become of Courtney, the first serious relationship I had a little over a decade earlier; last I had read, she had become an ER nurse somewhere in the suburbs of Detroit, a long distance from where we had met back when we both lived in Albany. However, with a parade of difficulties in my own life I needed to go back and make peace with some actions we had done to each other so many years earlier.
Albany, New York - October 2006
I originally had met Courtney while trolling Facebook, looking for people who lived geographically near me who seemed interesting enough. Two months younger than I and a graduate student wrapping up her studies to be a cancer screener, her profile picture showed a young woman with shoulder length strawberry blonde hair, glasses, freckles in some blessed places, and a wide open yet slightly forced smile. Her looks were a mere cherry on top of the real reason why I wanted to meet: she lived literally a block and a half from me. As my friends were clustered further uptown and even in the suburbs closest to Albany, it would be nice to have a friend within walking distance and my original aim with this was just that. So certain that we would be "just friends" that our first meeting was in her apartment, a third story walkup near a key intersection. We talked about the typical first date material without any expectation that this would end up anywhere near a relationship, in fact her profile said that she was "in a relationship" though she assured it was tenuous at best. While her DVD of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" played on her small television in the background, she made a risky admission.
"I don't think my relationship with my boyfriend is going to be lasting much longer, and to be honest I'd rather leave him and at least try to be with you," Courtney admitted. "You seem much nicer than he is and I don't have to drive an hour to do anything with me." Courtney went on to detail things regarding her current boyfriend, a friend she had met in high school who had his life unravel after being arrested for drunk driving. Given my hapless track record with women, the idea that for once I was going to be the man someone else got dumped for made me feel lucky. Our friendly evening then drifted into hugging and cuddling, a form of affection showing that was physical if not deeply romantic. After five hours, we went our separate ways for the evening with plans to meet up a few days later, during which time she said she would give the boyfriend she loathed the news that their relationship was no more. I was elated, yet somewhat cautious of what was to come. I knew that before I could enter a relationship with her, I had to get the approval of my friends which came about a week and a half later at the 21st birthday party of a friend who Courtney immediately bonded with given their similar personalities and interests in the health field. My friends overwhelmingly approved and welcomed Courtney into our ever growing circle, yet logistics of actually starting a relationship had gotten in the way thanks to a series of pre-existing commitments. That weekend, while out of town for the wedding of a cousin whose branch of the family I had not seen for quite some time, I awoke to a text message the morning of the wedding that was sent at 3:00 AM.
"I'm drunk and I miss you."
Our friendship had reached the point of drunk texts and had I been back home I would have been over to her place by 3:05 at the latest. Alas, I was in a hotel room in New Jersey, the wedding was the next day, and I regretted not knowing her sooner because she would have easily been my date to this wedding. As I would not return to Albany until Monday and she had a class on Monday nights, Tuesday night would be the next chance for us to act on these feelings. While at the wedding, one of the few people there without a companion of some sort, I felt an emptiness that I knew how to fill, I just couldn't fill it at the current time.
Tuesday night came and as soon as she met me at the door, we instantly kissed for a good minute and it felt good. While cooking dinner for her that night, I popped a question to her. "If you missed me so much, why shouldn't we be boyfriend and girlfriend?" Courtney didn't know. "Well, why don't we then?", I continued.
"Sure," she responded, not fully sharing the enthusiasm that I had in this case but more than willing to give this a try. Regardless of how she felt, our relationship went full steam ahead, my spending many nights at her apartment, often up into the wee hours of the night mocking assorted weird television and just talking about our lives. That weekend, Courtney revealed another thing that was on her heart.
"I wish you could come home for Thanksgiving with me." I had already committed to making plans to visit a good friend and his family for the holiday, my regular destination of Mom's house not an option given she had recently undergone a gastric bypass and was on a liquid diet. Courtney then went on about how Thanksgiving at her home was going to be quiet this year, her younger brother had enlisted in the military and the family was still hurting from the suicide of her father three years earlier. Tears of rage stemmed from Courtney's face as she detailed the events that led to her father taking matters in his own hands, that the fallout from being pushed out of a state job he had for twenty-five years just short of retirement was too much to bear. Thanksgiving this year would be just her and her mom, a semi-retired teacher, a loneliness she didn't want to deal with. I could not relate to the suicide but I could relate to feeling alone during holidays where the opposite is supposed to be true. While I was away for Thanksgiving, we talked multiple times a day just to see how the other was holding up.
As 2006 came to a close, we had started to delve into making longer-term plans as a couple. As I was going back to finish my bachelor's, a long story in itself, and she had finished her masters and was going into her first "real" job, we spoke of the things we wanted to do and the places we wanted to go when the weather got warmer. Montreal, Boston, Philadelphia, all the overnight travel I didn't want to do alone was now within reach with Courtney to share it with. There was one bigger piece of fish to fry: I was invited to a late Christmas gathering with my Mom's side of the family and I wanted her to pass the test of meeting Mom and some of my family. Courtney and I piled into her mess of an early 90s Plymouth to make the hour drive to visit Mom at her cottage on an apple orchard on the eastern foothills of the Catskills, spending the night in separate quarters before making the trip down to Long Island. The trip itself was eventful, Mom decided to take her old minivan which died en route, but an assortment of aunts, uncles, and cousins loved Courtney and saw us as a cute couple. Given Mom's lack of luck with men, it was good to see that this apple fell very far from the tree. While things on the surface seemed fine, meeting my family set something off in Courtney that would lead to the demise of our relationship.
The Monday after our trip to meet my family, I was going to meet with Courtney that night to see how her first day of work at her new job (a branch of a known testing lab) had gone. Once I arrived, she confronted me with a bit of shocking news.
"You know, if we're going to meet each other's families and such, we really should have sex."
I had told Courtney that I wanted to wait until a time I was ready before going down that path because I wanted to make sure our relationship was solid. While a Christian at the time, I was not opposed to the idea of premarital sex but I wanted it on my terms and on my time, not hers. Needless to say, anything and everything short of it were things we had previously had done and I had looked to losing my virginity for some time, just not like this. I asked her if we could wait a little more, perhaps after a trip to North Carolina I was taking with friends that was starting that weekend before the spring semester kicked off.
"If you really do love me, you'll have sex with me right now," Courtney flat out guilt tripped me. I didn't want to lose our relationship so I gave in, my first full-on sexual experience lacking the passion and unbridled glee that happened every time we fooled around. Truth be told, we had given each other wedgies with more passion than this sad act of fornication. Afterwards, we ended playing the original Super Mario Bros on her 1980s vintage Nintendo, the best way to try to bleed out coerced intercourse. After this, I felt something wasn't quite complete with me, as if this earth shattering experience turned out to be a massive void. When Courtney and I had met up with some of my friends for coffee later that week, they could tell that there was a feeling of cloaked frustration between us two yet I couldn't flat out confess that we had done something for fear that my more Biblicaly-minded friends would judge me.
My trip to North Carolina, with a one-day detour in DC en route which eventually would change the course of my life, was what I needed after all of this. I met people who I am still friends with to this day and have made memories that will last with me until the day I die. On the last night of our trip, one of my new friends - Wally, a lead campus minister for a student group at UNC Charlotte - asked me some questions about my relationship with Courtney, some biblical but mostly general relationship questions. Afraid to entertain judgment regarding having had sex, if you could call it that, with her, I tested his limits with the questioning, even bringing in my campus minister who was present to try to take my side.
"Remember when Jay knocked up Maddie the first time either of them had sex?," I said with a sarcastic lilt. Our student leader Vice President and Secretary two years earlier, Jay and Maddie were head over heels in love and "randomly" lost their mutual virginity while stuck inside during a blizzard. Our group survived that and at this point they were still members, albeit with Jay a senior and Maddie a stay-at-home mom to their one year old daughter.
"Yes. And it wasn't a clean situation to be in. I'm not going to violate their privacy, but I know that everything wasn't as you and anyone else saw it as," my campus minister said.
"If Courtney really loves you and wants to be with you, she'll wait for you. Ideally until marriage," Wally said. Wally had been blessed in a way, he married his college sweetheart two weeks after she finished her studies at a Christian university in Indiana, that he was off the market at the mere age of 22. At a seemingly ancient 24, I didn't know how long I could meet.
The next day was spent solely on the road, 13 hours from Charlotte to Albany less a few stops to eat and use the restroom, Somewhere in rural Virginia along Interstate 81, I brought up the idea of waiting for any further sex with Courtney via text message. Naturally, she seemed resistant.
"Well, if you really do love me, you'll wait, right?" I responded somewhere in the fifty mile mess where the states come fast on that highway - Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, absolutely using the words Courtney used on me a week earlier against her.
"When I'm in a relationship, I have an expectation of sex," Courtney replied, somewhere near Harrisburg.
"And fooling around and doing everything but that isn't enough. What about a relationship of true intimacy that is built to last?," I responded.
"Either we're going to have sex or our time as boyfriend and girlfriend is over," Courtney fired an ultimatum somewhere near Allentown. I didn't know what I wanted at that point, frankly what we had pre-sex was ideal for me, that wasn't good enough for her. The romantic aspect of our friendship was seemingly dead at this point. Once we got out of the car to get dinner and fuel up somewhere in northwest New Jersey, I was livid at everyone involved. Standing firm on my morals cost me the most viable relationship I ever had and I was not happy at all, as if the advice of those I trusted blew up in my face and cost me what I had yearned for for so long. Years later, I came clean to several friends about what really happened and the consensus was that through my denials that they knew something had gone on. So much for putting up a poker face.
Needless to say, Courtney and still stayed friends in the resulting months. We stuck to our plans for a Valentine's Day date as being together would be preferable to being apart and while our romantic chemistry had fizzled, we worked great as friends without the cloud of romantic tension. That March, she had been sent to a conference in San Antonio by her employer and after two days stopped responding to anything. I began to get worried, if she was in harm's way I would be heartbroken given that even our friendship was something I had wanted for some time. A week later, she broke her silence: She had gotten very drunk and ended up having a mental breakdown in the aftermath, the week she was not responding was spent under observation in the mental ward of a large hospital. I didn't seem to make much of it, everyone has had mental health issues at some point in their lives and the best thing she could use after returning home was a solid friend who wouldn't abandon her.
As Spring sprung, our friendship resumed as it ever was. While the idea of a romantic trip to Montreal or Boston was off the table, we still spent time together on a regular basis, often going out to eat at least once a week. In an attempt to get me to finally get my driver's license, she took me out driving and had promised her beaten up Plymouth as a set of starter's wheels to me when she was to get a new car later that year. While I was always a welcome presence around her friends and she was even more welcome around mine, my friends started to have some concerns about how long this could be kept up.
"You know that if she ends up finding a guy that you're going to end up on the back burner," my friends warned me in consensus. I already was trying to deal with losing a few good friends to graduation and to get my own, more adult, life set up and the looming truth of having my friendship with Courtney get curtailed wasn't something I wanted to confront. As time passed, she moved to another part of town, within walking distance, and I helped her shop for housewares and furniture. If it wasn't for our bedroom conflict, her new apartment very well may have been mutual, my own being basically a room with a miniature kitchen and bathroom. That July, everything came to a screeching halt.
"I've been seeing a guy and I think you two should meet," Courtney said. "Why not meet us for dinner one Friday night," she suggested a hole-in-the-wall pub right down the street from her new apartment. I arrived to find her and her new boyfriend, Greg, one of many cogs in the machine of New York State. Keeping conversation to basic small talk and trying not to make too much eye contact, I made it through meeting him. I had hoped that Greg wouldn't have much of a presence in my life. I guessed quite wrongly.
The next week, Courtney invited me to a play at the Park Playhouse, a theater inside Albany's sprawling Washington Park. I accepted, having not much else to do and wanting to have some time with her as a friend. Unknowingly, she had invited Greg to come with and while I was engrossed by the play I found that I was being wedged in as a third wheel of sorts and got the feeling that she wanted Greg and I to be friends even though her romantic past with the two of us created conflict. Greg saw me as the friendly ex she could easily take advantage of, I was jealous of Greg because if not for my own hangups it would be me in that position and I knew damn well that I'd never put my rebound girlfriend in such a position unless it was a fair double date. While all of this went on, Courtney was fired from her job at the lab because of performance issues that escalated after her breakdown in San Antonio; this job loss only made her lean on Greg further. Needless to say, I still considered her a good friend and lent any moral support I could give, however she soon would reach the point where my limits of friendship would be tested.
My birthday is in mid-August, a time of year when the looming presence of autumn makes itself known with earlier sunsets, the occasional chillier night, and ads for back-to-school sales plastered over the airwaves. For my 25th birthday, the weather in Albany leapt straight to October, barely hitting 60 degrees and having me make the rare-for-August wardrobe choice of corduroy pants to work and my resulting birthday dinner. I had called a restaurant I liked, a small neighborhood joint in a lull before colleges resumed, to save a table for myself and about ten of my friends, one of which being Courtney who swore that she'd go solo as Greg had to "work late" that evening. Imagine my shock when she walked in with Greg by her side, my failures as a boyfriend on full display. My birthday was already gloomy thanks to the weather and a professional reduction of duties that was a prelude to my own looming job loss, the last thing I needed was to have the girl I once dated to bring her new boyfriend to my birthday dinner. While I acted diplomatically, I felt a lot of internal anguish. After all this, I vented to a friend about the awkward state of affairs.
"Courtney has always been a bit...condescending when we've been around her. I don't think she really liked you the way you liked her, that she was with you as a matter of convenience than for an actual relationship," my friend brutally told me. "That she dared bring her boyfriend to your birthday dinner showed that she clearly didn't give a crap about your feelings." I knew that I wouldn't dream of doing the same if I was the one with a girlfriend and she was single and as such I asked her to not have him around me as what she did made me feel very uncomfortable. Surprisingly, she honored my request. We still met up for lunch here and there, but things faded away once she moved into Greg's apartment when she was no longer able to maintain her own rent. Eventually, she took a job at a fur store in a suburban strip mall, often inviting me to stop by to keep her company during her slower shifts. The last time we saw each other was at this shop, a dark and gloomy afternoon that winter, at a time when I myself was trying to get hired at said fur shop to help her out so she could return the favor. I never got the chance to do so, deciding to decamp for the greener pastures of the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, a goal I had set on the side trip I took en route to Charlotte a year earlier.
After I left Albany, Courtney and I kept in touch from time to time as she returned to college to stake a new career path in the field of nursing. Several months after I moved, one day she reached out to me that a mailer from a church I briefly attended was "a sign" that perhaps she should go herself and we used it as a chance to catch up. Eventually, we drifted away on our own paths minus a conversation a couple of years later where we both shared stories of our individual premarital anxiety, her wedding with Greg happening two months prior to my own wedding. Since we were both off the market, obviously with people we were both happy with, I felt that I could close the book on any sort of friendship with Courtney. However, she still had left quite the mark on my life, I just didn't want to admit it until it was dragged out that I needed to resolve it to move forward.
The evening after my therapist challenged me to reach out to Courtney, I shot a message off to her via Facebook Messenger saying that I felt bad for how our relationship ended and how I was standoffish regarding how she tried to make Greg and I be friends. I had figured that things in her marriage had gone south as she had reverted to using her maiden name. A few minutes later, I got a quick response from her that chilled me: "What did I do?" "You coerced me into losing my virginity to you," I bluntly said.
"We had sex? I thought that we just fooled around a few times," Courtney replied. "I don't ever remember having sex with you."
I was floored at her admission. I had felt guilt for eleven years over the fact that I felt the loss of my virginity wasn't 100% consensual, that she used meeting my family as a cudgel to get laid, that our breakup was because I wanted to wait until I was ready to have relations on a regular basis. I went through all of this anguish for her to forget that we even did it!? She mercifully changed the topic though soon I would find out how she could forget.
"I'm not doing good," Courtney said. "I had another mental breakdown a little bit after I moved back home from Michigan." I remembered the incident in San Antonio so many years earlier and how that ended her days as a cytotechnologist.
"After the breakdown, I lost my nursing license, then Greg and I broke up because I wanted kids and he didn't want them and wouldn't budge. Then my brother committed suicide," Courtney continued. My heart broke on the last statement, remembering how her father's life ended under similar circumstances. "I can't work, I'm hoping to get on disability, and I've earned and wasted two degrees now. I'm 35, my mom pays my rent, and if it wasn't for me being all she has left I would probably kill myself too."
I apologized for her abysmal string of luck, yet deep down inside felt that I had dodged a massive bullet. I don't know how I would have dealt with this as a husband, especially given the shaky reasons I would have had to marry her. While she probably would have fulfilled her goal of having kids, there are tons of opportunities that got to pursue thanks to our relationship going south. In an odd and somewhat gallows way, Courtney ditching me was just what I needed to grow as a person. We spoke for a time until she deleted her presence on social media at which point I realized that I could finally move on from any regrets that I had.
Sometimes we need certain people in our lives to help us grow as a person. As much as things between Courtney and I were unstable, I needed her to get over the idealization of relationships I had. While she has had awful life luck and I feel for her as such, at least I've been somewhat successful in my life, maintaining a successful marriage and bouncing back from personal and professional instability. I hope she reaches the same sort of peace sooner than later.
