Suicide Man

Single man David was ugly with a well-written profile. I'm very happy with ugly as long as the man is interesting. He had dot pointed his most attractive qualities and in amongst all the stuff he thought was great about himself he had written "I've saved someone's life."

I pictured CPR at the shopping centre or pulling a kid out of a pool and giving mouth to mouth. I sent off the kiss.

We got to the texting stage. I give my phone number quickly to get off the email, and once I'm at the text stage I want them to be short and sweet. Minimum number of texts before meeting. When and where is all I need to know. Safer that way. Less risk in having to answer the inevitable question - how many children. How about we meet before you ask about my offspring mate?  "Five" is a real turn off for most of them. Except the men who come from large families themselves. The freudian love they feel for their mummy normally makes me ok in those men's eyes for obvious reasons.  And I don't think the 5 kids is a turn off because men worry that I'm poor or that they will have to have something to do with my kids. It's a turn off because they imagine 5 children coming out of my vagina. I mean THE vagina.  I'm the thing attached to the vagina they want access to.  Do they want the vagina that's been stretched by 5? Usually not.

This man was a bit different. He wrote really well. We were texting back and forth for about an hour talking about our childhoods growing up in country towns. We both had pet ducks. He never asked about children. And he wasn't a withholder. A lot of men like to take control pretty well straight away and wait hours and hours to send their response. They think it gives the impression their life is so full they just never got around to looking at their phone during work that day, or after work they really get stuck into being a family man until they finally go to bed and look at their phone. A classic move. These days I don't even bother going on to meet those men. The text denier is a warning sign of only sad things to come.

I was enjoying our chat but it was getting close to midnight and we both signed off for the night. I was just starting to drift off to sleep when the phone beeped a few times in a row with these little beauties:


"On a scale of 1-5 how likely are you to commit suicide?"

That was immediately followed by

"On the same scale of 1-5 how often do you feel general anger on a daily basis?"

Then another

"I should clarify, not me, just someone I knew. I can't go there again."

Then this

"I have no anger in my body."


I groaned. Lucky David. No anger in his body. A wounded dove. A little rag doll. Just floppy and limp and completely angerless. Wrung out and left to dry. This was the fastest any man had ever managed to get it out there that she was CRAZY, not him. Every man has a crazy they like to tell you about. Once a man mentions a crazy ex, I don't date him again. Learnt my lesson there.

If you haven't had a relationship with them though, any label is up for grabs. David was a certifiable nut case.

Firstly, can I just say, as bizarre as the texts were, I was uncomfortable with the 1-5 scale scale. Surely an answer of 1 to either question would mean I had a small amount of anger and I had a hint of suicidal thought? Shouldn't the scale start at zero?  Secondly, I knew I could never give my real answers (which was 1 and 5 - I'm female for fuck's sake so plenty to be generally angry about) because he wouldn't go out with me. And I knew I needed to meet David even if it was just to see the story through. I felt a need for closure with this one.

I text back something funny about my texts being interpreted as depressing and angry and went to sleep.

We were due to meet the next night. I wanted to turn his ridiculous texts into something light, so at work that day I printed off a very long suicide and depression questionnaire and filled it in. Had quite a bit of fun with it actually. There was room for the clinician to write comments about the patient so I spent a bit of time laughing to myself as I filled in what I thought were funny interpretations of myself. Something a doctor might write. Serious but funny. My plan was to introduce myself and hand him the score sheets when we met.

Time to meet.

I popped the scoresheet in my hand and walked into the bar. After the introduction, I handed him the questionnaire and waited for him to laugh. I had pre-imagined reading through my answers together over the first wine. Well that didn't go as planned. David glanced at the title of the questionnaire and popped it on the table and asked what I'd like to drink. I offered to buy and after a standard awkward 3 seconds where the man-date asks if I'm sure about that, I did the usual, and went off to grab the drinks. At least he couldn't complain that the bitch got a free drink when he talked about me with his friends.

When I got back to the table the questionnaire was still lying there unopened. David didn't mention it again as he started up the small talk and it was just too tricky in the end to turn the conversation back to it. The window had closed and I kicked myself for wasting an hour of my time filling it in. Add that wasted hour to the thousands I guess.

David was uglier than his ugly profile photos. Shorter too than the 5 foot 8 inches he claimed. More like 5 foot 6. He was a serious one that's for sure. His mouth had no curve to it at all, just a thin straight slit. I could picture exactly what he'd look like hovering over me as we fucked. It wasn't pretty. He'd be staring seriously into my eyes but his eyes would be vacant, his concentration entirely on his own orgasm.  He had that 40-something thick neck going on. You know when the jaw line fuses with the fat neck in older men? Makes shaving easier but during vigorous man on top missionary it hangs down at you all red and swollen. Made me cringe. I sat down and asked about the texts.

And that's when David told me about the thing that happened TEN YEARS AGO.

2 hours and 3 drinks later he was finished.

10 years earlier David had dated a (his words) manic depressive sociopath. He lived with her and her teenage daughter for 5 years. That's a long time. You'd imagine that 5 years of living with a human who has diagnosed manic depression would make you pretty aware of a change in mood right? Apparently not. One night after a fight (she was in the wrong he said) she chose to sleep on the couch. Being in the right I guess meant he got to sleep in the bed. In the morning after getting ready for work he found her unconscious on the couch. She was diabetic and used daily insulin and she'd taken an overdose he said. He called for an ambulance. He saved a life...well the paramedics and hospital staff saved her life, he dialled for assistance. He left her after that, apparently on the advice of her psychiatrist who had phoned him to ask him to come in for a chat.

He filled in 2 hours with the minutiae of living with a crazy.

As we went to leave, I picked up my questionnaire and popped it into my handbag. He left me at the door to the bar even though my pushbike was tied to a pole 5 meters away. He'd got what he needed. Another free session. And I had closure. Something I will never seek again.

Comments

  1. Thanks Doris for another great insight into the dating world. There's a song by JJ Gray & Mofro called Circles, it's a love song of sorts, the singer tells his new lover ' I'm not the one who hurt you so much' in the past and asks her not to blame him for her past pain.
    (You have to do a gender switch). Let's stop walking in circles. Suicude guy sounds like he is stuck in one great big circle. He's got to be getting something out of it or he would well and truly moved on after 10 years. Or perhaps he just believes that all dem bitches be crazy?

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