Couples have a duty to be Cupids
Nobody believes in Valentine’s Day, but everybody observes it anyway. Even my own thoughts, married old bat that I am, wander down romantic lanes on February 14. For example, I remember bitterly how Bill and I had to meet in the elevator at work by mere chance, even though there were two people who could perfectly well have introduced us.
All those years Bill was driving down all the wrong streets — going to parties, trying to find me, and I kept leaving the same party five minutes before he came in, or crossing the street a few people behind him — we knew Frank and Sharon. They could have introduced us, perhaps over dinner.
Had it not been too much trouble.
Sure, they had to think of it first, mentally scrolling over the hundreds of people they knew, and they had to overlook the fact that we were both in other relationships, but still: They knew us both. I took that elevator for 14 months before Bill stepped into it, and I moved to another office not long afterward. We might have gone blundering on separately toward the grave, instead of enjoying a union that passed the fouryear mark, or was it the threeyear mark, last November.
I pause in my typing. “How many years has it been?” I ask Bill.
“Well, my little teakettle,” he says, “It’s been a feverish and exuberant five years . ... No, wait . ... Every year with teenagers counts for two, divide by the number of conversations about cars, carry the sofas ruined by your dog and your cat . ... Yep, it’s been just 45 years.”
“I didn’t ask you how long it seems,” I said, “lamb chop.”
We’re kidding, of course. But that odd Frank and Sharon business makes me wonder, on this day, why all the smug coupled-up duos don’t do more to introduce their single friends to each other.
Introductions by friends are still the most civilized way to meet people. I’ve been in favor of them since I was 17 and met my first husband, Mike Lara, on a blind date arranged by my sister Adrian, who was going out with Mike’s cousin Johnny. We double-dated to a bowling alley in Mike’s cherry red Chevy, which he drove at 18 miles an hour.
Even barroom encounters can be given the elegant 17th century touch of the formal introduction. Once I went with my photographer friend Mark to Stars for a drink. When he admired a blond woman sitting with another woman at a table, I followed the woman into the rest room, introduced myself and gave her Mark’s impressively outsized card. Then, a few minutes later, I introduced him.
It turned out I had the wrong blonde of the two, but they hit it off anyway, and went hiking on Mount Tam the next weekend. I don’t think I can be held responsible for the fact that she used the six hours to tell him about the rats she used to date, and the ones she used to be married to.
It’s true that making such introductions is risky. You spent all that time generously racking your brain to figure out that Robert and Sarah would be perfect for each other, and as soon as you point them out to each other at the party you give just to bring them together, they both pale, silently aghast at the choice you’ve made for them.
Or they’re grateful at first, when they meet someone in your kitchen who makes them want to run to the bathroom to get their hair to flop just so, but later when they start spending silent hours on the phone with each other, they remember whose stupid idea this was.
We want Frank and Sharon to know that we’re not bitter about those two years when they knew us both and did nothing. We know it’s not easy: We have ourselves so far put exactly two people together. They came apart after a year, but still — a year. We must have been right about something.
Go ahead, introduce the guy who sits behind you in your ceramics class to your friend Janet at work. They might marry and name their firstborn after you. Or forgive you eventually, at least.
This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on Feb. 14, 1995.