“Summer gave way to Autumn which gave way to winter. We passed our first anniversary; Tina and I went home to Utah for Christmas without Ted and stayed til New Year’s day. I spent New Year’s Eve with my high school girlfriends, getting blasted and telling them about my wonderful boyfriend. At midnight, I went outside, lay in the snow, and shouted drunkenly for all the world to hear, "I’m in love!” We celebrated Christmas with Ted when we got back. He had put up the prettiest tree I had ever seen and gave Tina some wonderful presents, including two Christmas kittens.
But around March 1971 I was getting ansty again – I thought Ted and I were so comfortable, we would never get married if I didn’t do something. “I’ve been thinking,” I told him, “that since we’re not married and we don’t have any plans, how do you feel about dating other people?”
“What do you have in mind?” he asked.
I wanted to say, “To push you off your duff, Dumbo,” but instead I told him that a guy at work had been asking me out, that I told this guy I had a boyfriend, and he asked me what kind of commitment we had and I didn’t know what to tell him. I put the accent on “commitment.”
“I don’t want to date anyone else,” he said, “but I know it’s not fair to ask you not to. Go ahead and go.”
This wasn’t what I had planned. Well, the hell with you, I thought. There was no guy at work, but I got Angie to line me up with one of her boyfriend’s friends. Ted didn’t seem to care when I told him I was going out on Friday night, but I was a nervous wreck by the time my date picked me up.
We went with Angie and her date to a tavern called The Walrus to drink and dance. I was having a miserable time, when Angie grabbed me and pulled my ear close to her mouth.
“You’ve got company,” she said.
I followed her eyes to the far wall and there stood Ted, glaring at me. I was furious at him for acting like he didn’t care a bit, and then following me. I marched over him and demanded that he leave. He was shaking like a leaf, and insisted that I leave with him.
“Are you crazy?,” I said. “You treat me like you don’t care about me. You let our relationship drag on for over a year and a half with absolutely no kind of commitment, and now you want me to leave with you. No, thanks!”
When I got back to the table I looked back and Ted was gone. So was the party, and everybody wanted to go. In the car my date was all over me. When we pulled up in front of my place, there was Ted, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. I stormed in with Ted at my heels.
“Did you have a good time?” he started in. “Is that what you want, to go drinking and dancing every Friday night?”
“What’s the choice?” I wanted to know. “Wait for you until I’m eighty-five? I’m going to be twenty-six next month. I want to get on with my life.”
“I know, I know,” he said. I thought he might cry. “You deserve someone who can make you happy, someone who has ‘made it’ already. I love you so much. Tonight when I saw you with someone else, I got so scared. I want to spend my whole life with you, and when we’re eighty-five, we’ll laugh and tell our grandchildren about the night Grandpa followed Grandma out on her date.”
Chapter V - Page 35/36 - The Phantom Prince | Elizabeth Kendall
