Never Contact Old Girlfriends
Advice to guys at this forum: never contact old girlfriends. They'll rip your heart out and dine on it.
After I bought my first computer, I got the insane idea of tracking down 3 old girlfriends I lost touch with over the years. You never forget your first girlfriend and mine was Leslie. When we met in high school, I was 15, she was 14 and I fell head over heels for her. We went together for two years before her father managed to break us up. He had money, my family didn't and he thought I wasn't good enough for his daughter. I never forgave Leslie for obeying his order to stop seeing me.
After weeks of searching the internet, I found the email address of a high school buddy who knew all about Leslie. This good Catholic girl had been married and divorced twice by the age of 23 and she now lived with her third husband in a small town in Ohio.
My first fiction book had just been published and my biography was listed on the book cover: award-winning journalist, travel writer-photographer, world traveler and now fiction author. I mailed a copy of my book to Leslie, asking her to forward it to her father after she read it. I wanted him to know that Not Good Enough had made a success of his life. Put that in his pipe and smoke it.
Incredibly, I never heard back from Leslie. Nothing, not even a thank you note for sending the book. So much for first loves.
Vi was the second old girlfriend I tracked down. Vi was 20 when I met her and her young husband Pat in the Air Force. They were allowed to live off base in a trailer because they were married. I was so sick of barracks life and chow hall food I eagerly accepted their invitations to have supper with them and hang out at their place two or three times a week. Before long we were the Three Musketeers -- drinking buddies, confidants, brothers and sister in arms.
Then Pat was reassigned to Thailand and I returned to barracks life and the chow hall. But soon Vi started calling me to invite me to supper -- as if nothing had changed. At first I made excuses to not go. I figured she simply missed her husband and would get over it if I left her alone. Eventually, however, her calls got under my skin. She said she was disappointed and hurt because I was avoiding her. After all, we were friends, too, weren't we?
I liked Pat a lot, but I was also human -- and lonely myself. It was impossible to resist a pretty young woman who made it obvious she had a thing for me. I ended up moving into Vi's trailer. War-time romances with married women left behind at home were more common than most people wanted to admit.
I was a happy man living with Vi, but I wasn't sure of how deep my feelings ran until I got orders to Hawaii. She drove me to the base terminal to see my flight off and she cried like a baby the whole time. It broke my heart to see her like that and then it hit me like a bolt of lightning: I was in love with this girl, married or not.
But in Hawaii I decided to be noble and forget about Vi so I wouldn't ruin her marriage to Pat. A few months later I was eating lunch at the base terminal restaurant one day when I heard my name being paged over the inter-com system. It was Vi on her way to Thailand to ask Pat for a divorce. I told her not to do it for me (she claimed she wasn't) and I tried to talk her out of it, but she was adamant. She said she just didn't want to be married to Pat any longer. The last time I saw Vi she was boarding her flight to Thailand.
Wondering if she had pined for me over the years, I found Vi's email address on the internet and wrote to her. I discovered she was the chief forecaster at the National Weather Center in Kansas City making six figures per year and there had been no pining involved in her life. After she divorced Pat, she had married and divorced a second time and now she was about to marry her third husband, an unemployed "bum" who intended to live off of her income. My first thought was I should have married her when I had the chance so I could be that bum living off of her lucrative income.
We exchanged emails for a few months after Vi married her bum. Then her replies became fewer until they stopped altogether. No doubt the bum had intervened to put the kibosh on our correspondence, afraid he might lose his source of livelihood.
The last old girlfriend I contacted was also named Leslie, like my first girlfriend. I met her when I lived in a Maui rainforest and she soon talked her way into moving in with me. How could I resist? She was 27, highly intelligent and (most importantly) she had the body of a Playboy centerfold. Life was good until I began to notice how neurotic she was. We began to argue and fight liked caged panthers, but she was the best lover I ever had. At one point I kicked her out and she moved to the other side of the island -- only to return whenever she got horny (which was often.) I finally decided this was the best arrangement for me to have with Leslie. Live on separate sides of the island and jump her bones whenever she cruised over to my side for a day or two. No muss, no fuss.
When I bought my own land on the Big Island, Leslie asked me to marry her and build a home for us on the Big Island. I practically laughed in her face and told her to forget it. "You don't even know how to be a real girlfriend," I said. "Why in the world would you want to be a wife?"
Just before I moved to the Big Island, I received a letter from Leslie. Inside the envelop was a photo of her posing nude on a rock. On the back of the photo this was written: "See what you're missing?" I laughed until I had a stomach ache.
Searching the web, I found out Leslie worked as a "mermaid" for a Maui dive shop (escorting tourists on diving expenditions.) I sent an email to her boss asking her to contact me. The reply was this: "Leslie says she doesn't remember ever having a friend by your name on Maui." Note the careful wording. She remembered me all right, but not as a friend. I confirmed that I had written to the right person later when her father died and his obituary listed his daughter, Leslie, as a dive instructor at the business I contacted.
There are other old girlfriends I sometimes get curious about, but after my experience with these three, I have no intention of ever trying to contact them. My new philosophy is let sleeping dogs ly in the memory where they belong.
