10,252 Potential Boyfriends
I’m going to change or obscure parts of this story to protect people’s privacy. Let’s just call it historical fiction.
I don’t normally seek out women who are smarter than I am, but it makes me happy when they find me. I’ve been on the younger side of May-September relationships before. It was one of the favorite parts of my life. Being on the older side of a May-September relationship can be tragic. Let’s say her name is Holly, for reasons that will become clear later.
Recently out of a divorce, I had no interest in any women anywhere, but Holly found me on a place I can easily be found: the internet. She found me on several social chat programs, but found out we were playing the same video game, Bioshock. Freshly turned thirty and working on her master’s in civil engineering, she was sixteen years my junior, but remarkably lonely.
Learning she had no friends seemed like such a shock to me. She had her sister (sometimes) and her mother (sometimes). To me, she seemed brilliant and vibrant and remarkably funny, how other people didn’t find her seemed so unlikely—unless she was hiding.
One night, we began talking over Skype, and she started to wash her face and take off her jewelry. To get into bed, men take off their pants and fart. Sometimes, they fart, take off their pants, and fart again. Nightly rituals are very different for women. After a few weeks, it became clear that she wanted me to be a part of her nightly ritual. It reminded me of my wife, only without the arguing or the laying of guilt.
I off-handedly mentioned my lifelong struggles to understand “Ulysses” by James Joyce. In two days’ time, I noticed she had a copy on her nightstand where I could see it. Discussing the events in Dublin, its characters, and the character of Joyce’s mind became part of our nightly discussions.
“You look like Audrey Hepburn,” I said one night. She wasn't familiar with Hepburn, so we watched “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and then read the novella. She did look quite a bit like Hepburn, only with more real estate in the lower regions. I didn’t mention that. Soon, I began to notice that my Holly was reshaping her eyebrows and copying Hepburn’s eyeliner. It would become her defining characteristic.
Watching her brush her teeth and put on her makeup in the morning became part of our routine. I mentioned several times that I found the voyeuristic nature of our relationship uncomfortable; it was becoming evident that she intensely wanted the intimacy of a relationship, the kind of intimacy that only comes with sharing a bathroom.
I insisted that what she needed was a brilliant and handsome local boy. Living in one of the larger Northwestern cities, the demographic description of her city was pretty readily available on the internet. From it, we began to calculate the odds of her finding a suitable boyfriend, closer to her age, in her city and the surrounding suburbs.
Arguing over which number we should assign to her potential suitors that might be gay, we eventually reached the number 10,252. “That’s quite a lot,” I said. “You had best get busy.”
Trapped between an imaginary boyfriend and a father figure, I sought to find out more about her actual father. A successful physician two states away, I learned that he abandoned the mother and the sisters when they were fairly young. He provided them with regular support checks, but no emotional contact.
My role in all this was becoming clear. I began regularly and firmly asserting that we could talk, but I could not be her boyfriend, even though we’d met and had dinner.
An Ashkenazi Jew, I pointed out that there was a large Jewish population where she lived that might be the source of friends and potential boyfriends. Judaism reminded her of her father. She rejected the idea outright.
We watched “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and both versions of “The Jazz Singer” to try and help her digest her Jewishness. It was at this point that we began discussing her advanced ADHD and my own.
A boy, two years older than her, was attracted to her. Living in another country, she began to reciprocate. Agreeing to meet him in his country, she learned he was still living in the same bedroom in his mother’s house that he had when he was twelve, he had no driver’s license, and had never had a job. She called me for help getting home again.
Deciding that I had cost him his first and only ever girlfriend, the boy began spreading rumors that she was seventeen and I was forty, labeling me a pedophile. I pointed out that if she was seventeen for me, she was seventeen for him too, but logic wasn’t something he was good at. I would learn that most people on the internet hated him when he began trying to ruin my reputation. Meanwhile, she was turning thirty-one and dropping out of her engineering classes.
“We can’t continue to talk if you’re not going to try with your life.” I insisted. When her father found out she’d dropped out of school, he threatened to cut off the support checks if she didn’t get a job.
Obviously unable to find work as an engineer, she took a job at the grocery store where she bought ramen noodles and occasionally things that were actually edible. There she met a boy with high-functioning autism who matched her low-functioning ADHD. Worried she’d break my heart, she said she’d found someone. I told her I was very glad. If it didn’t work out, there would still be 10,251 potential boyfriends for her.
