What Was I Thinking?

By David Martin

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
~Winston Churchill

Before getting married, I liked to think that I was a pretty good dater. After all, I had been doing it for years and I always figured that practise makes perfect.

I made it a habit to ask out women whenever the opportunity arose. My thinking was that if I was to get better at this, I had to keep doing it.

For the most part, this approach worked. The more I dated, the less nervous I was. I became skilled at the art of conversation and was soon an experienced dater. Or at least, so I thought.

I hoped that all of this dating experience would prepare me for the eventual day when I met the woman of my dreams. Whoever she might be, I reasoned, I would be ready. I would not be my previously nervous, tongue-tied self, but instead would sweep her off her feet with my charm and savvy conversational skills.

And so it came to pass that I met my potential Ms. Right. I was sharing a house with my sister who had a friend who had a sister named Cheryl. The friend and her sister happened to stop by one day and I was smitten.

Despite my wealth of dating experience, I was quickly reduced to a gibbering idiot. I offered them dinner and ran around like a headless chicken doing my best to prepare an edible meal. The cool, calm, suave relationship expert I thought I had become was nowhere to be found.

Somehow I managed to survive our first encounter without completely tripping over my tongue or drowning in a bath of my own nervous sweat. In fact, it looked like I might have actually salvaged victory from what initially had appeared to be overwhelming defeat when a few days later I phoned Cheryl and she agreed to go out on a date with me.

Now when someone is smitten like I was, the logical thing to do is plan a can't-miss date that will convince the object of your affection that you are the only man for her. Unfortunately, despite my lengthy dating career, I seemed to instantly forget everything I knew about burgeoning relationships and how to cultivate them.

The first part of our date wasn't bad. I took Cheryl out to dinner. I figured this would be a chance for us to get to know one another. Sadly, the only thing she got to know was that she was dining with a nervous, chattering idiot who couldn't shut up. It seemed that my extensive dating experience was of little use when I was love struck.

Still, dinner wasn't a complete disaster and I had planned a second part of our date: a movie. And not just a movie at a regular cinema, but a special showing at the arts center in our city. The movie would be shown on an extra large screen and would be backed up with a symphony-class sound system.

Now a rational man trying to impress a woman with a movie would probably choose a love story or a romantic comedy. But since infatuation had short-circuited my reasoning ability, I chose instead to take Cheryl to a special showing of the movie Apocalypse Now, which, I can now attest, does not appear on any woman's top ten list of first-date movies.

From the gloomy napalm-filled opening scene backed by The Doors singing "The End" to the final gruesome encounter between the two main characters, the movie is the complete antithesis of a feel-good romantic comedy. As the error of my choice became manifest, I could almost hear Cheryl mouthing the final words of Marlon Brando's character Colonel Kurtz: "The horror, the horror."

Needless to say, the date didn't end well. I still persisted and tried asking Cheryl out again a few days later but the answer was understandably an unqualified no.

Unlike Apocalypse Now, however, this story has a happy ending. Five years later, Cheryl and I reconnected and started going out. Apparently enough things had changed in the interim, including my choice of date movies, that I was given a second chance.

We've now been married for almost twenty years and I expect we'll be together for twenty more. So long as I don't rent a copy of Apocalypse Now.

http://www.chickensoup.com