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I was out of college for three years when I started dating my first
real girlfriend. A group of us went to a ball game one night
and then to Sandy Nolan’s apartment afterward for some cookies and
punch.
“Can you stay a little longer?” Sandy asked,
after the last group of stragglers began to leave.
“Sure,” I said, not thinking anything of the
invitation.
The two of us chatted for another fifteen
minutes, and I got up to leave for a second time. As I was
saying good night, she reached up and asked me for a hug.
That’s when Sandy told me that she liked me and asked if we could
date.
I went home that night on top of the world.
After twenty-five years, I had finally found someone who wanted to
love and accept me just for me. All my fears of being
undatable were swept away with one hug, a kiss, and the promise of a
tomorrow with plenty of emotional intimacy, something I had craved
for years.
A week went by before I began telling people that
Sandy and I were dating. It took that long for me to believe
it myself. Boy, were our friends surprised. Never in
their wildest dreams had any of them imagined the two of us
together. Sandy was a couple of years older than I, and we had
first met in high school. She had taken a few years off after
graduating before coming to Taylor University in the middle of my
junior year. I had enjoyed having someone there from my
hometown, and it had been natural for us to start spending time
together. To make a long story short, we started out at Taylor
as friends, but it didn’t take long for that friendship to sour.
She had her eyes on Lyle Davis, a friend of mine from Hill House.
Once she had easy access to Lyle, she let me know in no uncertain
terms that I was no longer needed. She tried blowing me off
while at the same time wanting to maintain the appearance of a
friendship. She wanted to use me to continue putting the moves
on Lyle, and when she learned that I wasn’t going to play ball,
things became pretty cold between the two of us.
None of that mattered in the summer of 1983.
We had both moved back to Wisconsin, had patched up our differences,
and now were dating. Life was good, or so I thought.
Little did I know that the euphoria I had felt
during the first few weeks of our relationship would not last.
Before long, the “honeymoon” stage was over, and by the second
month, we were fighting about everything from how much time to spend
together to whether or not we would have a dog if and when we
decided to marry. I kid you not. Sandy was so adamant
against having a pet that she wanted me to vow never, ever to buy a
dog, regardless of any frantic begging our future kids might do.
That’s right. It didn’t take us very long to bring up the “m”
word—her idea, not mine. I’m ashamed of even considering
marrying someone who was so obviously wrong for me. Yet the
prospect of marriage, even to Sandy, was important to me, and we
talked openly about our hopes of one day settling down together.
As I recall, those discussions didn’t last for more than a couple
of weeks—the time it took her to decide she didn’t really want to
marry me. However, it took us much longer than that to stop
dating.
Sandy was in love with the idea of being in love.
She had an image of what she wanted in life, and it included a
husband, four or five kids, and a house in the country with a white
picket fence around the front yard. She knew exactly what she
was looking for, and it didn’t include a man with cerebral palsy.
Her dream man had long blondish hair and a beard and wore a green
flannel shirt. Just imagine a lumberjack, and you’ll have a
pretty good idea of the kind of man Sandy was looking for.
I hope you don’t think I’m making all of this up.
I’m not. Sandy herself told me.
“Look! Look! There he is!” she
shouted one evening while we were sitting on the couch.
“Who?”
“That’s the guy I want to marry!” she said,
holding up a magazine and pointing to a picture of a guy much like
the one I just described.
If that wasn’t enough, she then took a pair of
scissors, clipped out the picture, and taped it to the refrigerator
door. I knew then that I could never measure up to Sandy’s
expectations of what she wanted in a man, but that didn’t stop me
from trying. Oh, how I tried. I did everything that I
could think of to make our relationship work, and the harder I
tried, the more we fought.
So why didn’t I just break up with Sandy if
things were so bad between us? I could have saved myself a lot
of heartache if I had ended the relationship after the first few
months, as I should have. Yet I didn’t. I couldn’t.
For years, I had searched for someone to love and accept me just as
I was. I was sure that breaking up with Sandy meant giving up
all my dreams for the future. It was just too hard to admit
that the fears and insecurities I had so long felt about being
undatable might have been true. I continued dating Sandy a
full year longer than I should have simply because my fears of being
alone made breaking up unthinkable.
Deep down, I knew that my disability would always
prevent Sandy and me from having a life together. I kept
wishing for the impossible, that she would somehow be able to look
past the cerebral palsy to the real me inside. She
couldn’t—but still I hoped. I hoped for the one chance in a
million to convince her that I was indeed lovable, despite the
cerebral palsy.
Looking back, I believe that Sandy did try to
make things work. She tried to love me. She just went
about it in the wrong way. She thought that she could love me
without loving the disability. She tried loving me and
ignoring my disability. She tried loving me and tolerating my
disability. Then she tried loving me and rejecting my
disability. When that didn’t work, she tried faking it, but
that didn’t work either. By rejecting my cerebral palsy, she
also rejected me. It did no good for Sandy to say that she
loved me and at the same time say that she wished I were different.
Sandy didn’t love me. She loved the guy she wanted me to be.
My dream world was shattered one Sunday after
church. We were walking along the side of the road, holding
hands and looking at the fields in the distance, when out of
nowhere came a quizzical look in her eyes. She took one step
backward, looked at me, and asked, “Steve, is there any way, if you
try really hard, that you could walk a little straighter?”
I was mad! It had taken me twenty-six years
of effort to walk as well as I walked that day, and still that
wasn’t good enough for Sandy. How dare she!
I should have ended the relationship then and
there. But even then my hopes for marriage prevented me from
breaking up with Sandy. That didn’t come until a couple of
months later, when I finally decided that spending the rest of my
life by myself was preferable to life with Sandy.
Nevertheless, letting go of my relationship with her was one of the
hardest things that I’ve done in my life. I was convinced that
by saying goodbye to Sandy I was condemning myself to a life of
loneliness. It had taken me twenty-five years to find Sandy,
and now all my hopes were gone. I feared loneliness, but I
knew by then that being alone, even for the rest of my life, was
better than another week of being with Sandy. |
