Carefully, that’s all.
I met Andie when we were both in our late twenties. Our initial acquaintance came online, via a message board for finance professionals. But we met in person soon afterward, since finance pros tend to come through Boston with some regularity.
My late twenties were also the time when I started having more married friends than single friends. And Andie was totally, totally married. To a huge dude who was also from her general area of the country (the Teutonic upper Midwest).
But Andie’s husband wasn’t part of our mostly-online social group: Instead he was an architectural draftsman who also served as a youth pastor on weekends. I met him once or twice, and on those occasions he seemed almost absurdly taciturn, lacking any effervescence of personality at all. Occasionally I wondered to myself: This guy was a youth pastor? And married to the constantly effervescing Andie?
But I did meet Andie’s kids several times. I was fascinated by her elder daughter, who somehow managed to accept my appearances just like any other part of her life. To Sally I guess it seemed normal that once every six months or so a clumsy oaf like me would pop up and try to have an awkward conversation with her. Even though I always needed to have the rules of her favorite videogames re-explained to me from scratch.
Andie was fortunate to have a few major social advantages in life: She was extremely beautiful; she knew it; and she could discuss with utter frankness how her femininity and looks helped her both socially and professionally. (Andie was employed at a level of the finance business that the rest of us could hardly touch. And she worked for a huge firm that managed bond portfolios — so over time the Aughts were good for her business too.) Yet Andie also argued very persuasively that her looks were an unfortunate match for her nerdy personality, and in her younger days they actually undermined her social life — something about LAN parties, I didn’t catch all the details there.
And ah, Andie’s personality. Andie’s looks genuinely bowled people over, to the point where she was frequently asked to model when she lived overseas. But it was her personality that was Andie’s real work of art.
First, Andie considered herself an interesting oddity among her peers, and she responded positively when others agreed with her. This was a test I could easily pass: Andie was pretty unique in my experience, and I could hardly imagine anyone not finding her interesting.
Second, Andie was always going on about the politeness instincts she’d learned growing up in the Midwest, and how out-of-place those instincts seemed when she lived elsewhere (including Boston). She also had strong views about the strictness and emotional remoteness one finds in Teutonic-American families; these were views she believed I shared, since I had a similar upbringing and did not challenge her on it.
Andie was also an evangelical Christian, of a particularly eccentric and voluble type. She apparently had regular encounters with the supernatural, although she tended to describe them in very plain language so they came out sounding just like general spiritual experiences. She also outright condescended to “mainstream” Christian churches like the one she’d grown up in — not necessarily because they were wrong about dogma, but because she thought they limited the varieties of religious experience that people were capable of having.
You might wonder how an atheist like myself — one with a theoretical understanding of Buddhism — responded to Andie’s religious musings. And my answer is: I loved hearing Andie’s thoughts on any topic. Especially on this one, in fact, because her eccentricities were so profound and intricate.
For instance, Andie was a kind of armchair Jungian — in a much more committed way than I was an armchair Buddhist. She frequently composed long narratives about various aspects of her psyche, which she had given individual names and personal histories: lusty and fickle Persephone (namesake of Zeus’ daughter and Hades’ bride), withholding Jacob, tricky Alex.
Andie also felt regular sexual lust for professional women of her acquaintance. She often revealed this lust to her husband, and then I guess the two of them had a good laugh about it (maybe with God too) — and that was the end of it. But when she confessed these same desires to me, they seemed quite sincere and deep-rooted. Moving, even.
Andie and I saw each other once or twice a year — maybe a bit more frequently during the short time she lived in Boston. But most of our contact was via e-mail. And what e-mails they were: Andie was a ridiculously awesome correspondent. I have no idea how a full-time-employed mother of two finds time to compose such detailed missives — full of quotidian encounters, dream journals, and philosophical musings. At the time I was usually either struggling with graduate school or else preparing for a professional-certification exam — but when I had a free hour or two, I could still return serve.
So how did a single dude like me respond to receiving all of these personal revelations — from a woman he finds so uncommonly beautiful and fascinating? In fact I had some ideas. Anecdotes from my past were occasionally on-point. Other times I challenged Andie with homilies I picked up from my bookish study of Buddhism. Sometimes I would try to illustrate these points in Socratic dialogues, which Andie seemed to love — perhaps because she thought I was acknowledging the multiplicity of my self. (Even though I tried explicitly to deny, as the ancient texts instruct us, that I had a unitary “self” at all.)
I also shared with Andie some of my adventures — by which I mostly mean failures — with women. Sure, why not? Andie was wise enough not to offer me her married-woman’s advice (she had wed young and hadn’t dated much at all). But perhaps because of her intimate involvement with religion, she did seem to understand and sympathize with the existential romantic yearning that many guys experience but which often seems unfamiliar to women.
More to the point: By my late twenties I had plenty of experience at being attracted to beautiful, sexy women — while keeping that attraction completely separate from our friendship. But Andie was a different challenge: Our relationship was so satisfying to me on additional levels — emotional, intellectual. I was much less skilled at keeping that kind of attraction at arm’s length.
But of course I didn’t have any other choice. And despite how beautiful she was, I wasn’t truly attracted to Andie in a desperate, romantic, I’d-do-anything-for-you way. Sure, if for some reason Andie ever decided to pursue me, then she could certainly have me: given that she could write so winsomely and endearingly about the myth of Persephone, what kinds of marvelous mash notes would she be capable of? (Or sexts?) But I didn’t have the impulse to pursue her. Not because she was married — but because the impulses she did give me were so confusing and novel. Cross-purposed, maybe.
Of course anyone who’s ever turned thirty and remained single knows the end of this story: Andie was just the first of many, many married women I would encounter and be attracted to on an emotional level…and just leave it at that. Andie was the most exciting one, too — in part because she was so eccentric, and in part because she was my first. To this day Andie and I keep in regular touch, although I’ve since exhausted my never-very-deep knowledge of Buddhism and have now moved on to writing her parables about other philosophical topics.
But Andie was definitely the person who taught me how to pursue a friendship with a married woman — a deep, sincere, passionate friendship, offering powerful emotional satisfactions while risking zero emotional entanglements. I’ll never tell Andie how much she truly means to me, since such forthright emotionality is clearly out-of-bounds in our relationship. But many times I’ve told her in a general way how much I value her friendship. And otherwise I just try to accept her phenomenal generosity and pay it forward when I can.
That was how I learned to be friends with a married woman. No one advised me on how to do it. I just had to figure it out myself — awkwardly, and while constantly fighting the sense that I was Doing It Wrong. Here’s hoping it goes more easily for other folks. Younger dudes especially.
Image credit: By user stevendepolo via Flickr
