by Trish Ryan
Dan was also the first boy to break my heart.
If I’d been a little older, or a little wiser, or a little more something, I might have learned from this experience to wait before stitching my life to someone else and getting all entangled. But I was hooked, blinded by the awareness of how much better I felt as one-half of a whole than standing alone. I liked the kissing, and the cuddling, and knowing someone would call at night to encourage me when algebra seemed insurmountable, so I focused on re-creating that circumstance as quickly as possible, adding my budding romantic life to my prayers.
High school was a blur of melding for me, of wide-eyed hopefulness crashing into every cute boy who wandered by like a pinball searching for tilt. I picked myself up off the ground over and over again when it didn’t work out. It was fun, though—the wondering, the waiting, the flirting, the hoping. And I was good at this game of attraction, almost entrepreneurial, in a way. If they gave out varsity letters for getting into new relationships, I’d have been a shoo-in for the all-star team.
When the time came to pick a college, I surged off on a quest for new lands (read: new men) to discover. But to my utter astonishment, after a tour of New England campuses, I fell in love with Wheaton College—an all-women’s school just south of Boston.
I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. Indeed, it’s a fair indication of how devoted I was to the pursuit of romantic happiness that when I announced that I’d decided to apply to Wheaton, nobody believed me.
“You . . . at Wheaton?” my friend Matthew said, trying unsuccessfully to hide his laughter. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Oh—you must mean Billy Graham’s alma matter in Illinois?” my guidance counselor said, trying to clear up what was obviously a misunderstanding. Apparently, it was easier to believe that I’d been born again on my first college excursion than voluntarily chosen a school with no men.
WHEATON COLLEGE WAS in transition when I arrived in the fall of 1987, a roiling hotbed of fury and feminist angst unleashed by the recent (and somewhat ironic, in my case) decision to abandon 150 years of exclusive women’s education and admit men. Walking to the dining hall on my first day there, I stared wide-eyed at the stately elms and maples lining the center of campus: they were strung with dozens of colorful bras, like an eco-friendly Victoria’s Secret commercial. I learned that this assortment of feminine underpinnings had been flung into the branches by angry seniors, a protest against the encroaching testosterone. I couldn’t help but wonder if the female power message wasn’t lost on the seventeen-and eighteen-year-old boys who visited campus that first year—if they didn’t think they’d landed on the ultimate Fantasy Island, where lingerie literally grew on trees.
Given my varsity-dating accomplishments in high school, I was oddly ambivalent about the sudden shift to coeducation. To me, college was the beginning of real life, and dating here held greater significance. This was where my prince would arrive, where we’d sow the seeds of our happily ever after. I didn’t need lots of guys anymore; I just needed one—The One. Greater Boston was loaded with colleges filled with men, I reasoned—it couldn’t be all that hard to find one.
I met Chip at 2:00 a.m. one morning, a month into my freshman year. Walking to the bathroom in my floral flannel pajamas and fuzzy blue slippers, I was surprised to see a tall blond guy walking down our hall with two friends. He looks like Freddy from Scooby Doo, I thought sleepily. The crest on his navy blue windbreaker indicated he was from the local military academy, which sent a shiver down my spine. Men were not allowed in our all women’s dorm unescorted under any circumstances, but military guys were banned altogether from our campus—the result of a scuffle in which one of them had thrown some girl’s boyfriend into the pond. We’d been warned that these guys were only after one thing (a thing it was presumed that Wheaton girls were not interested in providing), and that we should avoid them at all costs.
But Chip was cute, and funny, and he smiled as he leaned against the wall to talk to me as my big pink glasses slid down my nose. We went our separate ways after a few minutes, but a mutual friend set us up on a date, and after that we were inseparable. The rest of Wheaton was welcome to protest against the men; I was happier with my boyfriend.
A FEW DAYS later I met my soon-to-be best friend, Kristen, an elegant, preppy blonde who sat in front of me in European History. I was a bit awed by her. She strolled into class each week and casually shrugged off her leather jacket, telling a friend about spending the weekend at her boyfriend’s beach house, or how he’d taken her to see Bruce Springsteen in concert; she seemed impossibly sophisticated. We were paired together for a project on the ascension of monarchical dynasties and bonded almost instantly over two things: a shared disinterest in the entirety of nineteenth-century Europe (Kristen eventually developed an affinity for the antiques of the period, but that was a decade, several boyfriends, and a considerable fortune later), and our mutual conviction that the quest for the perfect man was the defining characteristic of our lives. As academically curious and accomplished as we appeared on the outside, inside, we were throwbacks to the founding days of Wheaton, when it was a fine institution where women were groomed to become wives.
“I’ll never feel secure until my boyfriend proposes,” she told me. I knew just how she felt.
LIKE SO MANY schools at this time, Wheaton’s message about male-female relationships was rather awkward, as the faculty and administration waded into the morass of collegiate gender dynamics. Those first two years were littered with hours of thoughtful workshops on strategies to help men and women communicate with one another in our newly coed living environments; as if men and women hadn’t been communicating with one another in coed living environments since Adam first met Eve. It was the beginning of the political correctness movement, and Kristen and I, along with an expanding group of friends, learned to alternate our pronouns, identify oppression in everything from great literature to restaurant menu pictures (one memorable guest speaker convinced us all that the plate of clams advertised by a local seafood chain was nothing short of pornographic), and ignore cultural differences. We absorbed the ethos and strove to treat people of all shapes, sizes, colors, and dating preferences with open-mindedness and acceptance.
Oddly, though, this barrage of acculturation training ignored our most obvious social challenge, offering no help at all in negotiating the labyrinthine world of heterosexual romantic relationships. As our minds steeped in almost three decades of feminist womyn’s progress, our leaders were loath to acknowledge that, as nice as it was to befriend international students and even a lesbian or two to broaden our horizons, the relationship that would most influence our lives, should we decide to enter it, was marriage. We majored in the typical array of liberal arts subjects: political science (me), English (Kristen), and history (our friends Francesca and Tracy), which provided occasional opportunities to discuss marriages that struggled and/or ended badly (the Kennedys, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, the whole Henry VIII debacle). But we rarely discussed unions that succeeded. We never talked in our classes or workshops about what characteristics made for a good husband, or whether we had any responsibility to be good wives. We admired accomplished alums like Leslie Stahl and Christine Todd Whitman, but never asked, “What are their marriages like? Are they happy with their sex lives? Do they ever see their kids?”
In our off hours, though, we asked. We spent hours contemplating past boyfriends, current boyfriends, prospective boyfriends, and where one might find new members of the male species on the upcoming weekend. Like scientists, we analyzed the behavior of the men in our lives, determined to assign some motive or meaning to every word or gesture. And we consoled one another when things didn’t work out.
Kristen’s perfect boyfriend broke up with her, and she barricaded herself in her room, refusing to come out. Francesca, Tracy, and I sat outside her door for hours, cutting pictures from the J.Crew catalog and shoving them under her door to remind her how many other cute, preppy g
uys there were in the world. She finally emerged, her sniffling giving way to giggles. A few weeks later she ran smack into a guy who looked just like one of our paper-doll cutouts. He swept her off her feet, then spent the next year telling her she was fat.
This is where some real advice on male-female communication patterns might have been helpful—some tips on sorting out the good guys from the bad, perhaps, or coaching on how and when to send a jerk packing. But there wasn’t anyone to teach us that; it just wasn’t on the agenda. The purpose of a liberal arts education, it was understood, was to prepare us for our future—our careers, our unique contributions to the planet, our pride-infusing legacy for subsequent generations. Husbands and children were nice accessories, the theory went, people we’d come home to after a day out living our lives. How we acquired them was entirely up to us.
Indeed, the only school-sanctioned dating advice I received in my four years of college (other than the ubiquitous workshops on preventing date rape) came via a psychology course called Friendship and Love. On the first day of class, twenty-three of us sat in a circle, staring with rapt attention at our professor, a white-bearded man in his late fifties. Passing around a detailed syllabus, he told us that he was a Buddhist, that he and his wife had an open marriage, and that the goal of this class was to help each of us recognize that “faithfulness” is a momentary concept, not be confused with—or degraded by—long-term commitment.
“I could have a successful relationship with any one of you,” Professor Big Love said, running his gaze slowly around our circle. He didn’t say if any of his students had taken him up on this offer. “As we learn to redefine our vision of relationships in terms of meaning, rather than duration,” he continued authoritatively, “we will transcend our obsession with ownership and learn to enjoy real love.” Our reading list consisted of titles such as Brief Encounters: How to Make the Most of Relationships That May Not Last Forever. I wrote my journal entries about my wonderful new boyfriend, Chip; Professor Big Love awarded my efforts with a long string of Bs, and encouraged me to broaden my horizons. The official school belief seemed to be that we could do/be/accomplish anything we wanted, and we didn’t need a husband to make it happen.
Or, for that matter, God. Along with our future husbands, God was rarely mentioned on campus. Aside from a semester-long class on comparative religion (which dismissed Jesus and his trinity in a curt, fifteen-minute overview the day before the final), I rarely thought about God at Wheaton; I was too busy expanding my mind and living up to my potential. God was like a benevolent grandfather, a vague-yet-beloved relative I’d visit dutifully—albeit infrequently—when I remembered.
Indeed, the closest thing I had to a spiritual experience in college was the night Kristen drove us to a local Catholic shrine devoted to the Virgin Mary. We weren’t there for worship, but rather for the famed Technicolor light show they put on each year at Christmastime.
“Omigosh!” Kristen exclaimed as we turned into the main entrance. “Do you see that?”
“JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON!” Francesca recited, reading the six-foot neon letters hovering over us from the roof of the main building. This set us into a fit of hysterical giggles, and we spent the next two hours wandering through acres of fluorescent, blinking reindeer and Santa Clauses, reminding each other of this catchy truth and sipping beer from our soda bottles. Jesus was no more real to us (or at least to me) than Santa’s little elves. But for months after that, whenever we needed a moment of levity to lighten the load, Kristen would look at us earnestly and say, “Remember: JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON!” and all our worries would be momentarily subsumed in an uncontrollable fit of laughter. It never occurred to me that God might provide anything beyond this sort of momentary stress relief. Honestly, it never occurred to me that I’d need Him to.
CHIP PROPOSED TO me at the beginning of my junior year. I wore my new diamond with pride, happily checking off one more item from my to-do list for assembling the perfect life. We planned our wedding, and I was enveloped in dreams of lace and tulle, the perfect party for a prince and princess on their way to becoming king and queen of the world.
“I NEED TO tell you something,” Chip said one night on the phone a few weeks later. He was crying. I’d never heard that before.
“What is it?” I said softly, wondering who had died.
“The party last night,” he stammered. “There was this girl. I drank too much . . .” The story tumbled out in one awful sentence after another: he had hooked up with that girl, on the couch in his parents’ living room. Chip had cheated on me. “I was showing her our engagement picture,” he cried. “I don’t know what happened.”
I was stunned. Waves of nausea knocked me over onto my bed, and I curled up in the fetal position, mumbling incoherently into the telephone, “How could you?” We had a whole life planned: I’d applied to law schools in distant cities to be near where he’d be working, after which we’d move back to New England to be close to our families. We had it all laid out. And now, in one stupid, drunken night, he’d ruined everything.
My family tried to comfort me. “It’s an awful part of life,” my dad admitted, “but people you love will let you down. You can’t hold it against them forever.”
“We love you,” my mom reminded me. “Whatever you decide to do is okay with us.”
The next few months were agonizing as Chip and I assessed the wreckage of our relationship. He begged for forgiveness; I tried to forgive. I’d always sworn that if any man ever cheated on me, I’d dump him immediately and never look back—but as I’d made those bold pronouncements, I never considered what I might have to lose. And when the time came, I didn’t know how to choose between righteous indignation and swallowing my pride. Always more resilient than independent, I chose option number two. And I closed down, not telling anyone—even Kristen—what had happened.
Chip treated me reverently after that, like a fragile piece of art. This was worse, almost, than if he’d just turned cold and told me to get over it. Suddenly, he had no backbone: as much as his cheating bruised me, it broke him, almost beyond recognition. The phrase “a shell of a man” came to mind as he showered me with all manner of supplication and apology.
When all was said and done (and cried and yelled and anguished over), I couldn’t go through with the wedding. I couldn’t face the prospect of spending the rest of my life missing how things used to be. Two months before my graduation, I called the whole thing off, even though my fluffy white dress was not returnable and it’s hard to find a use for two hundred pre-embossed cocktail napkins celebrating a couple that has just broken up.
“What do you mean, Chip cheated on you?” Kristen asked me, stunned, when I finally told her. “That doesn’t make any sense.” Exactly. Chip was my balancing force, my safe place, the one we all counted on to take care of me, no matter what. Everyone agreed: He was that guy, the one who could never do anything like this. And yet here I was, my life sprawled out in front of me like the shattered pieces of Humpty Dumpty, with no viable plan for reassembly.
“God,” I cried in bed, my pillow drenched with tears. “How could you let this happen? Help me . . .”
Chapter Three
Build a Bridge and Get Over It
Three weeks later, I met Josh and assumed my prayer had been answered. It fit my fairy-tale worldview perfectly: I was in trouble, so God sent a handsome man to rescue me. And while it’s true that there are few things as amazing as how quickly new love can piece a hurting girl back together, it’s also true what they say about assumptions.
WE WERE THE only two people in the dorm hallway on a Sunday afternoon, walking in opposite directions. We smiled as we passed each other. He was beautiful—a Nordic giant with an easy smile and a relaxed confidence. He looked like the man I’d dreamed of as a little girl, the square-jawed Ken that Meg and I had imagined as we dressed and re-dressed our Barbies. Almost involuntarily, I turned around to check him out and found him looking back at me
. A warm feeling oozed through my body, soothing all the jagged edges of my freshly torn heart. I’ll see him again, I thought, even though I had no idea who he was or where he came from.
A few days later, Kristen and I were sitting on a bench outside the dining hall after dinner. Out of nowhere, he walked by. “Don’t I know you?” he asked, turning around. I pretended that he did, because it felt like the truth. I gave him my phone number. It seemed natural. Destined, even.
“Who was that?” Kristen asked when Josh headed inside.
“I’m not sure,” I told her. “It’s no big deal,” I lied.
The next night he called, and we talked for an hour. We went out that weekend.
“He’s gorgeous!” Kristen admitted after meeting him for the first time. “But I keep catching myself wanting to call him Chip . . .”
The first time Josh kissed me good night, I was certain my world was firmly back in place.
I was still burning from the shock of Chip’s betrayal, and the stark realization that my own instincts were not enough to keep a man—or at least keep him faithful. I cast about for strategies to hold Josh’s interest, somehow forgetting that I had caught his interest without this sort of plan. Much of our two-year relationship can be summed up by the afternoon we spent meeting his family in Vermont.
It was a hot day in May, and his brother suggested we all go down to the “swimming hole” to cool off. I pulled on my new bikini and resolved to impress Josh as a brave, outdoorsy type of girl who could still keep her French manicure pristine. I wasn’t either of those things—brave, or outdoorsy. But I was determined to be what I thought he wanted.
