The Path Not Taken

"Yeah," she said, "Dave and I had it this way." Then after a short pause she added, "he was fun, and kind and smart. A lot like you, except you are a little kinkier, and I like that."

My own moralistic upbringing was working in the background to convince me that I should want more with this woman, and that I should make a commitment, despite my rational knowledge that we could never be more than "intimate friends".

After we started having regular sex the question of her looking for an apartment never came up again and I never brought up anything about rent. She continued to buy her share or more of the groceries and do most of the cleaning and cooking when she wasn't on a job and I continued to enjoy the best of all worlds a student could have. Val was extremely respectful of my study time. She never tried to distract me from time I needed to study and she kept enough awareness of my schedule to send me back to my study if she sensed I didn't feel ready for an upcoming test. Instead of using sex to distract me from essential studies she did just the opposite. No sex until I was prepared for the test, and often postponing it until after the big exam. In every way she was the perfect girlfriend for a student.

How well we meshed that year, coupled with my moralistic sense that I should make more of a commitment to her were leading me to use a word I hadn't, 'love'. Oh we both said it a lot; "I love your pussy", "I love how you get hard for me" etc. but never as "I love you". Two things helped me stay back from saying it; the first was my advance knowledge that this arrangement was likely, and that I wasn't the first it had been made with, and second the growing realization that we were very different personalities despite how well we worked in the roles we were in. I had the next 10 to 20 years of my life planned out; where I would work, the areas of expertise I would focus on, etc. It didn't matter that almost none of it came about, the planning, that was me. Val, on the other hand, took things as they came along. She wasn't aimless in the sense that she didn't want to grow or expand, it was just that she looked at each opportunity as it presented itself. She had tremendous people skills. Looking back I can see that perhaps an opportunity to partner with someone opening a restaurant might come along. Or maybe her modeling would attract the attention of an up and coming artist, boosting her fame and modeling fees. There was no way to know, any more than in what field of work I would get the chance to show off my talents. I suppose an older and wiser me would have realized that her way was just a different but equally valid way to face life. In the standard romantic comedy the two realize that they need each other for balance. I'm not sure real life works out that way in most cases, and in any event it was way beyond my awareness or ability at that time.

As we approached the end of my academic year our sex life got more intense and frequent. It was as if we were both trying to cram as much into the time remaining as we could, as if anticipating a "dry spell" to come. There were more than a couple of occasions where my dick was red and sore and swollen to half erect from all the activity. Val's pussy had a similar experience with her labia turning red and puffy. We just laughed at our own excesses and spent a few nights just cuddling.

Like my predecessor my lease didn't run out till the end of August, even though I'd be moving back to Texas in June. After such a wonderful year I certainly had no qualms paying for the three months I wouldn't be in the apartment. I was more than happy to do that for Val. Our good-bye was a little emotional, thanking each other for the good times and the companionship, and wishing each other the best in the future. It didn't get overly dramatic because we both had settled back into the frame of mind that we never expected this to last more than the year we shared.

I had grown a lot emotionally. Calling it a casual sexual affair made it seem like there was no caring, no involvement with each other except sex. That wasn't the case. I think I finally realized that it was possible to have a caring and sexual relationship without convincing myself that it was ever lasting love. The only 'dishonesty', if you want to call it that, was face saving on both of our parts. Would it have really been more honest to pretend that we were meant to be together for a lifetime? Only to face the harsh fact, there from the beginning, that we were not meant to be a life long partnership.

I could never know that learning that lesson this year had saved me from a bad marriage to someone I met on the rebound from Sharon. The thing about convincing yourself that someone is the love of your life, is that it makes it harder to admit that you made a mistake, that you were wrong about it all. So the bad marriage hangs on, and year after year it slowly gets worse, until someone finally is willing to say "enough, I was wrong about all of this." Of course by that time the wounds are deeper, the hurt longer lasting and often there is collateral damage. There were other "casual affairs" before I found the 'love of my life'. Any one of which, could have been that bad first marriage. In that sense, I owe Val all of my happiness in my marriage because without her I would surely have succumbed to some new myth of the love of my life. We never had contact again, but I think of her often, and always with the hope that she found the sort of lasting happiness that I believe she helped me achieve by NOT having to cast every relationship into the mold of everlasting love. Love is a good thing and nothing to ever be ashamed of, even if it is only for a time and only for some of the person you're with. Thank you, Valerie.