I'm a great wife.  Dave will vouch for this, and not just because he knows that disagreeing with me will have him living in the back corner of our garage amongst the Halloween decorations and earthquake supplies. Before I was a great wife, I was an awesome girlfriend.  I was also a pretty decent one night stand. 

With rare exception I was never the one to do the breaking up of any of my relationships. Sitting here tonight I can't really remember most of the reasons that were given by the boys I dated for why our relationships had to come to an end. The ones in high school I remember as being fairly tragic, but that's to be expected at that age.  Everything was dramatic back then.  You'd get dumped, sob uncontrollably for hours, talk with all your friends and try to figure out what went wrong.  Your friends would call your now ex-boyfriend and ask him why on your behalf or to tell him what a jerk they thought he was.  You'd go to school the next day and everything would feel foreign because your perception of your little world had been irrevocably altered and you'd have awkward conversations with your ex in the hallways between class.  People would talk.  Two weeks later you would move on to the next love interest and the cycle would start again.

Jim and I, circa 1985

I have always made it a point to stay friends, or at least friendly , with my ex-boyfriends. I still talk to Jim, my beau from 9th grade and the one to whom I donated my virginity.  We swap emails and Facebook messages from time to time, and regularly threaten to meet up and go for a drink. After we broke up he remained a large part of my life for a number of years.  He was the brother I never had and a best friend that I could say and do pretty much anything around.  He escorted Parrish to her high school prom, and later was one of the legion of surfers who carried her ashes out to sea.

Parrish and Jim at the prom

About a year ago I friended Andy, my great love from 11th grade, on Facebook.  We swapped the obligatory "Hey good to see you're still alive" messages.  This was our first communication in over 26 years. (Crap, I'm really getting old.) Now Andy and I had one of those epic and tragic high school love affairs.  As I recall I was "the other woman" for at least part, if not all, of our relationship.  Being as I was a secret love, there was much drama and intrigue - and at least one incident where I had to hide in his bedroom closet in the morning, after spending a clandestine night in his room, so that his mother wouldn't find me.  While I don't really remember many of the details lo these many years later, I do remember being heartbroken for quite a long time after we broke up. 

However, in the intervening years, I have not given Andy and our tragic love affair much thought.  Until a few weeks ago when Andy called to apologize 27 years later for the way he dumped me.  I gotta tell ya I was pretty much rendered speechless.  I've not given him more than a passing thought over the decades, but clearly he's been carrying around a rucksack full of guilt over me.  After I got off the phone with him, I wondered to myself to whom he imagined he was apologizing.  A 17 year old young, fit, pseudo-punk rock girl with spiky blond hair, or a middle aged woman who is 40 pounds overweight and is losing her hair and her eyebrows?

Andy was not the first man to apologize to me either. Several years back, while at a beach party-reunion for the old gang that I grew up with in Malibu, Parrish marched right up to this guy Paul and informed him that he owed her sister an apology for being such a dick to me after a one-night stand that had gone horribly awry. Back in the 80's Paul had told me he was single, when in fact he was engaged to my cousin's best friend.  When his fiance found out I was branded an cheap whore, and I think I may have even been slapped for my troubles.  Since no one argues with a crazed woman whose filters and patience have been excised by a brain surgeon, Paul dutifully turned around and sought me out amongst the party-goers to apologize.

Jean-David and I circa 1984

Then there was Jean-David, the nice young French boy I met the year I was working at Walt Disney World after high school.  Eventually he left to go back to France and we kept in touch by mail.  For years we wrote and sent photos, regularly promising to meet again.  I went off to college and graduate school, and he went off to become a rock star in France.  Eventually the letters stopped and after a few decades of silence he became yet another memory of youthful romance.  That is until about two years ago when he found my email address online and sent me an email apologizing for not having kept up with our correspondence.  I'd like to think he was rather disappointed to find out that I was already married and he had missed his chance.

Jean-David

 Honestly, I couldn't tell ya what it is about me or about dating me... but apparently I leave an indelible mark.  Perhaps it was because I put out.