The conversation about the TV show Frasier got me thinking about a couple of opportunities in my life where I could really relate to what happened to Niles, who missed a very small opportunity to express his devotion for Daphne.

In the mid-nineties the girl was Tracy. Tracy was the first girl for whom things like getting married and having children even entered my mind. She had expressed some interest before, but I deferred because of another girl whose name I can no longer even remember. But I’d left the door open and sure enough, within a couple of weeks I’d decided that not only was it something worth pursuing, it was the only thing work pursuing. It was all coming to ahead when I was going to drive up there and we were going to go out. I was going to tell her how I felt and everything would work out marvelously.

Unfortunately I got held up before I could leave. I was helping a melodramatic friend work through her most recent melodrama. Her phone line was busy each time that I tried to call. When I finally got up there, her father told me that the line had been busy because she’d been talking on the phone with some guy who eventually came to pick her up since I hadn’t showed.

They ended up in the park and that very night she lost her virginity to him. She’d intended to save herself for marriage (indeed, her consent to the sex was dubious at best) and she got her mind wrapped around the idea that the only way that she could make what happened okay was if things worked out between them. Any chance she had of actually ending up with him was dashed by her subsequent obsessive behavior. All of this was complicated by fact that the sex was unprotected and she was convinced that she was pregnant. And just as she’d dashed her chances with him, I’d dashed my chances with her with my dramatic outbursts and anger over the sudden turn of events. Just as he’d understandably become uncomfortable with her, she’d understandably become uncomfortable with me

It would have been easier to take if it had simply been a matter of her losing interest or never having had interest. I won’t go too much further into it except to say that the story did not end there. We had opportunities later on, but none of them bore fruit because of a really bad night she had in late autumn 1995.

Several years later the girl was Evangeline. Eva and I met before we were out of relationships that we both knew we were getting out of (it was the first serious conversation that we’d had, actually). There were midnight meetings, days in when we pretended to be sick from work, and we even went shopping together for gifts for the last Christmas together with our respective partners. Though we’d both intended to wait until the new year before getting out of our respective relationships, circumstance played a hand and pushed that date up (a subject for another post) to mid-December.

She ended hers on a Tuesday and it took the next two nights for me to end mine. We were going to meet up that Friday night, but her father decided to throw a party so we couldn’t. But, she told me, I could come to the party if I wanted to. We went back and forth on it and decided that we’d go ahead and postpone until Saturday night since we were both free to make our own plans.

I didn’t hear from her again for two days. Two excruciatingly long days. While I was watching some television that night, her ex-boyfriend (not the one she’d just dumped) made an appearance. He’d always had this magical hold on her. She denied that what was obviously happening was actually happening, but it was like watching a car wreck in slow motion. From the point of view of the driver of the Pinto running into the SUV.

Nothing was the same after that even after it became apparent that he, as with Tracy’s beau, was more-or-less using her for sex. By the time she got over him, I was brimming with so much anger that our relationship (the first of three) was doomed from the start.

Both of these cases haunted me a great deal until I finally met Clancy. It’s one thing when something doesn’t work out because it can’t. It’s not even really that bad when a relationship doesn’t work out because you screwed up big-time. But another thing entirely when you can look back and say if it weren’t for that particular crossroads that you didn’t even realize you were at, you could have married them. That’s the case with both Tracy and Evangeline. We never recovered from that initial stumble where some other guy showed up when I was supposed to.

I guess you could say that it taught me some lessons, but I’m not sure that they were all good ones. Mostly, they just left me overeager to nail things down earlier than it is right to start trying to do that. But it had an upshot: if I hadn’t gotten very serious with Clancy very early on, there’s no way that we would have made it.