E and I had been dating for 68 days when she dropped the K-bomb.

Sixty-eight days is a long time for a woman to tolerate my presence. Hell, 68 minutes is pretty good at this point in my life. I am serious. If I go on a date and put together 68 consecutive minutes without blurting out something embarrassing or offensive, or without my dinner companion dropping subtle hints like, "I want to leave right now and I never want to talk to you ever again and I'm going to sit in the back seat and if you try to kiss me I will Mace you," I feel like as jittery and nervous as a pitcher taking the mound in the ninth inning of a perfect game.

Don't screw this up, I say to myself. Almost there. You have got it. Just... don't... mess... up. And then:

"So, Angela, would you call that a scar or a mole on your neck?"

Anyway. E tolerated my presence quite nicely for 68 days, and I returned the favor. This was not hard for me to do. E is smart, funny, quirky-in-a-good-way, compassionate, and tall. She dressed as a pregnant nun on Halloween. We engaged in acts of transatlantic travel together. She knew that Zinfandel is a red wine. And on Monday night, she dropped the K-bomb on me.

"So," she said, "if you were really serious about a woman, and she told you that she wanted to have Kids someday, what would you say?"

"Well," I answered, "I would say that that is not a possibility for me."

This was true. I do not want to have children, and I never will, and I will not thank you for trying to convince me otherwise. I don't like children. I don't know how to talk or relate to them. When there are children around, I get anxious and irritable and wish they would go away. Unlike E and Whitney Houston, I was never issued the special glasses necessary to see the special brilliance and unlimited potential of children. All I can see are short, loud people with runny noses and peanut butter in their hair.

E and I discussed these things for a while. It was the strangest breakup I have ever experienced, and not just because it was conducted in the nude. We conducted the breakup in a strangely rational and dispassionate manner, like characters in an Ayn Rand novel. This wasn't because we are cold, unemotional people, (at least, E isn't), but because of the obvious hopelessness of the situation. Having children is a binary proposition: either-or, true or false, 1 or 0. No compromise possible. We didn't want to break up, but we had to. What else was to be done?

At one point, E said, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry," I said. "Neither of us is doing anything wrong."

"I know," she said. "But I'm sorry anyway."

I'm sorry too, E.

+posted by Lawrence @ 12/20/2003 08:03:00 PM