“Remoted” Day 299 (Saturday)

The recent steady diet of Lifetime and Hallmark Channel movies is wrapping up month two. It’s escapism that doesn’t give me insomnia and nightmares like scary movies. Or the news. Today, after a season of too many of these movies to count, I was ruminating on the common plotline of high school pals reuniting after many years of separation and life experience. It occurred to me that this has happened to me. Not once or twice, but thrice. And by my continued singleton status, it is safe to assume that in no instance did it ever conclude like in the movies. 

No Hallmark stories here.

The first time it happened, it began much like a Hallmark movie script. At a class reunion, Classmate X and I struck up a conversation. In ninth grade, I’d had a crush on him, but he didn’t seem to know I existed. I was going on vacation just a few days after the reunion, and we made date plans for after I got back.

Leading up to my vacation, there were nightly calls from X, which always included his exclamation, “I can’t believe you’re going out with me!” After my vacation, we met at a restaurant for dinner. The conversation included a gem labeled as a big, red flag during the post breakup analysis. He said, “I called my mother before I left and I told her I’m having dinner with my future wife.” There was not a hint of humor in this comment, and I don’t know about other women, but that is not something I want to hear on a first date. There were also 10,000 iterations during the date of, “I can’t believe you’re out on a date with me,” which seemed to be his favorite topic that night. Halfway through dinner, he was not the only one who could not believe I was on a date with him.

The younger, wiser me would have run from that date and never looked back. Unfortunately, I was trying to be a nicer, more open minded adult and give people a chance, so I agreed to see him again. We dated for a couple months which included so many phone calls from him to my work that I got in trouble with my boss after the switchboard complained. He would call out sick to his job, drive 20 miles to my apartment, and be sitting on my doorstep or worse, hanging out with my landlord when I arrived home. I broke up with him after a couple months of his suffocating, stalker behavior, but he decided we were still dating and continued to call and show up at my apartment until I threatened to call the police, unplugged the phone, and eventually moved to another town.

The second time, it was a guy I worked with at my high school job at the supermarket, where he was my favorite bagger. We went to different high schools and most of our dates involved meeting at the public library to do our homework at the same table. We went to one dance at his school and I was grounded for arriving home ten minutes past curfew. After that, we just ghosted each other. Years later, he was living in Denver, found me online, and sent an email to say “hey.” We did the long-distance thing for many months and it was great – he had his life, I had mine, we connected with daily emails, regular phone calls, and long-weekend visits in Denver and Worcester. Once, he suggested I move out to Denver, but everything was still really high level and casual. 

It was comfortable and going great until the day I accidentally blew it all up by signing an email with a casual “love ya!” just like I signed messages to many other friends. That casual slip led to two weeks of unanswered emails and phone calls, followed by the sudden lengthy letter dumping me. He explained that during the radio silence he took time to think about things and concluded I was more serious about us than he was. The assumption wasn’t even correct, which he would have known if we had talked about it. I snapped and told him off with an email lecture about how nice it was that he was pondering life and the significance of “love ya” for two weeks while I spent the same time worried that he had been murdered or killed in a car accident. Years later, we connected again and had the chance to laugh over how stupid we were, and shortly after that he died of cancer. It still makes me sad thinking about him.

The third reconnection happened via the magic of Facebook with another guy from high school and we shared a year of casually hanging out now and then. At the time I was living with Mom, working a minimum wage job, searching for a place of my own, and was hundreds of applications deep into searching for a job where I could simultaneously afford to both eat and pay for housing. Going on a date meant guilt at leaving Mom to deal with the dogs after she had already dealt with them all day while I was at work. Between the dog-related guilt, embarrassment over the suck-ass state of my life, rock bottom confidence, and exhaustion, there was nothing left to invest in any sort of relationship. It was doomed from the start. 

Never, in all the many hours of quality time invested in the Hallmark Channel, have I seen any of these situations portrayed in their delightful, heartwarming little movies. There is probably a rule against stalkers in Hallmark movies, but there are other channels devoted to that storyline, usually with gruesome endings. And really, who would want to watch stories about failed relationships with no happy ending? That’s real life for some of us, but it wouldn't even make a good reality show. Maybe Hallmark will come out with a special line of romantic horror stories.