Rebound man February 9, 1986
I didn’t know what a rebound man was until after I started
dating Suzanne and her mother pulled me aside to warn me, “This won’t last.”
The woman liked me; she didn’t want to see me get hurt
because her daughter’s leaping out of a long-time relationship with her high
school sweetheart and into the arms of an older man (me), part of that
transition that comes after graduating college and people seek to leave their
childhood toys behind.
Most of all, she ached to escape her parents’ house, using
me as leverage that she would eventually also shed when the time came.
College had made her a feminist, and she often put down her
mother for her old-fashioned ways. While
she loved her father, she disliked his dominance.
She felt so much more superior to them, to a blue-collar
life style she saw as degrading, and made her judgement from the ivory tower of
college she had reached, and they never could, worse, never wanted to reach.
My friends saw her as far too caught up in academic life,
spoiling any real conversation they might have with her.
They didn’t see her college graduation as the great
achievement she did.
She was brilliant, and determined to stake her claim in the
world, but at the cost of alienating ordinary people – including me.
She despised her mother’s choice to become a housemaker and
feared that if she did not escape her parents’ house, she would get trapped in
the same life with the same kind of man her father was.
She was determined to mold herself into a totally different
person, even once struggling to learn French so she could prove she could tackle
anything regardless of how difficult.
She tended to select groups of men as substitute for the
family she abandoned, making these men accept her as their equal, accept her as
“one of the boys” when she clearly was an attractive and distracting woman in
their midst.
She told me once she was unpopular as a child, which forced
her to push herself hard to know as much as any of the boys, including her
childhood sweetheart who she parted ways with when she graduated college – just
one more piece of the past she needed to part with in order to make her own way
in the world, latching on to me, and my group of friends, as a bridge.
She might not have bothered had her ex-boyfriend not put up
such a fight to keep her from absconding with his group of friends. She wanted
to continue her friendship with them even though they were his friends, and she
was no longer dating him.
When she failed to accomplish this, she did the same thing
with me and my friends, dating me for a time as her rebound man, while hitting
on each and every one of my friends from childhood, all of whom eventually
rejected her.
She was not their cup of tea.
As smart and educated as my friends were, they did not trust
academia, something she completely embraced. They were too practical, if not
too much like their fathers, then with an abiding respect for what their
fathers stood for, and they seem alienated by her rejection of those old
values.
Eventually, she moved on, found someone in academia that
better fitted her needs, moving in with him briefly before a marriage that could
no more last than my rebound relationship with her could. She simply wanted
something beyond any of us, and still searches for it.
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