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When I was in high school, my dad asked me one day “why aren’t you dating girls?”

At the time, I really didn’t have an answer- I hadn’t thought of that. I was perfectly complacent with what I was doing at the time, which was mainly studying things and writing stuff.

But ok, I’m hormonal, and I think dating has something to do with that, so I got started late in my senior year. There was no instruction manual, you learned that stuff from peers. Often, they didn’t have any clues either unless they were predators. We went to the Roof Garden a lot. I liked the bands, not-so-much the dancing, but I did it, high school style.

Then I graduated, and now it was time to learn the college version of dating. I did actually go on one, and we were both delighted to not kiss each other at the end of that because we didn’t like each other (candidly) in the first place (it was a blind date).

So I skipped that. It wasn’t necessary among us hippies (it was the early 70s). You just loved the one you were with, like Stephen Stills taught us to do. As far as I know, that’s the only instruction I ever received and I guess it worked ok, until my friend Mark loved Judy Angel Eyes just because he was with her and that made me real mad and ruined my life and stuff.

I crawled back to my home town, and when I went to find my friend at a bowling alley the night I blew back into town, a girl who had just graduated from high school (or was maybe just about to) landed on my lap there, so I bought her expensive earrings and married her. That lasted twenty years.

We parted bitterly after SHE loved somebody she was with, and I moved instantly into a living arrangement in another town that lasted even longer, and it worked, mainly because we had nothing but time to explore the possibilities, and then she died. There are SOME instructions for that.

I gave it over a year to mourn and think about things and moved back to my home town again. A woman who recognized me but otherwise knew nothing about me invited me over to watch television.

Then, I returned to the high school model of dating, with some modifications like I don’t open the passenger door to see if the girl can slide in wearing that mini skirt without me seeing “something”. But that’s a digression; I did most of the other stuff the way I understood it, and it ended in utter failure: the Breakup three years later.

I do not understand the Breakup. It’s distinctly from the high school model-the hippie version was just don’t come around here no more.

I also do not understand The Divorce, which I neatly didn’t mention until now. I refused to participate in my own. I just got a letter one day in November that I was divorced.

I suspect that not all dissolutions end without agreements, surely they’re not ALL unilateral, but mine certainly were.

I think all this might have happened because I followed the high school model. I haven’t been there for a long long time.

I suppose the trick is to develop my own model. That oughta be interesting. It’s gonna be original at least.