trickster

I saw a woman at dinner tonight who I haven’t seen in a couple of years — and I felt the same electricity from her that I experienced six years ago when she first walked into my office.

I vividly remember that day. I was working at a college and she needed my help with something. I have no idea what we talked about, but I remember the day clearly because I knew — from the moment I saw her face — that she was one of those women.

I’ve never tried to explain this to anyone, because it’s been such a gut-level thing that I wasn’t conscious of it for a long time. All I know is that there were a very tiny number of women who come into my life who are “one of those women.” They are some very small group in which my gut recognizes something and says to me, “This is one of those women who might be a right partner for you.”

It’s completely from the gut. If my gut tells me that, I need to pay attention to the woman. If my gut doesn’t tell me that, I’m never going to fall for her, no matter how great she is otherwise.

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“I just wish he would say, ‘I love you,’ more often,” the woman confided to her friend. “Is that too much to ask?”

I was listening to a couple of women talk about the problems one of them has in her marriage. They were sitting at a table next to me at dinner Saturday night. They weren’t very loud, so I didn’t get all the details, but I was struck very strongly by the fact that the troubled woman seemed to believe her life would be so much better if her husband just said those three little words more often.

We’ve been conditioned by our culture to think that words of love will make everything all right. The Beatles told us that “love is all you need” and many people believed them, because it feels so good to think that. Popular culture is full of this notion. If you say, “I love you,” and you mean it, everything will be great. (Cue romantic music and happy ending.)

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Remember when you were a teen-ager and you felt attracted to someone you barely knew and you were constantly on the lookout for sightings of that person — and seeing the person made you feel nervous and you were afraid you might say something really stupid? Of course, that fear didn’t stop you from inventing ridiculous excuses to talk to the person, leaving you feeling even more ridiculous and nervous afterward. Remember?

I haven’t experienced that in a very, very long time, but someone has been making me feel that way again lately. It’s halfway great and halfway exasperating. It’s the terrible, horrible feeling that comes with having an attraction to a person that you just can’t explain.

I met her about a month ago when she had a reason to drop by my office. Since then, she’s dropped by to chat four or five times. She just left again and I feel happy — giddy, actually — to have had five minutes with her. I barely even know the woman, but she affects me like a drug that I crave. Why?

She’s beautiful. She’s very smart. She’s fascinating. She has interesting things to say and she also actually listens. (I mentioned a book that I think is important, and she expressed an interest in reading it. That rarely happens.) I can list objective things that I find attractive about her — but the truth is that it’s something very different.

There’s something magnetic about her. There’s an air of electricity about her presence. There’s something about her that transcends her looks or personality or anything else that I can put my finger on. There’s something about me that feels oddly connected to her. I’m constantly around beautiful, intelligent and interesting women, but she’s different in a way that I can’t explain.

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