Old couple
She was eighteen, a college freshman. He was a first-year grad student. But they weren’t as far apart in age as all that, really; he’d skipped a few grades in school.
They met online, as the cliché would have it. The VAX cluster ran a creaky, semi-illicit bulletin-board system. They both posted on the roleplaying board, a few other places. He was delighted to hear of her interest in Arthuriana, invited her to guess what was up with the stories his character was telling. She didn’t guess; he had to tell her. He was retelling Malory.
They got to talking, via the VAX equivalent of IM. (Anybody else remember BITNET?) She realized quickly that he was formidably intelligent. He got around soon enough to telling her that she was the smartest girl he’d ever known. It was five or six weeks before they saw each other in person, meeting geekily and gawkily in a campus computer lab. He turned out to be a skinny, out-at-elbows lad all over denim; she recognized him the minute he walked in. He had to look around a bit before he zeroed in on her. She was a tall, chunky, rawboned woman with long untidy muddy-copper hair, wearing a magenta T-shirt that commemorated the previous summer she spent learning beginning geology in Montana.
Neither of them admitted how much they liked each other. There’s always a fly, isn’t there? The fly was—she was taken. Had a boyfriend already. If I weren’t taken, she wrote a friend, I met this other guy…
Come Halloween, she was abruptly not taken any more. Dumped. Dumped pretty hard, actually. He kept quiet, not wanting to seem importunate or insensitive. Even so, two and a half weeks later they spent the night together… no, not like that.
That was fifteen years ago tonight. Three graduate degrees, two graduate-school flameouts, two years of enforced separation, two major moves, a wedding, one house and three or four apartments later, they’re getting to be quite the old couple, they are.
We are.