"We should be dating," Flor said frowning at herself in the mirror on the back side of my car's visor.
She had spent the evening not exactly frowning, but not happy either.
I was driving her home after celebrating a friend's engagement. I'm not the fastest car on the track, but even I could intuit Flor's anxiety that at the age of 27 she had yet to find the love of her life. She needed to talk, but had to screw up her courage. I waited, as always, while she stared out the window at the arctic landscape of Michigan on a snowy January evening.
"We should be dating," she repeated half to herself as we skidded in the slush to a stop at a light. She turned to me, "I'm calling in our agreement. The one we made in college that we would marry each other if we hadn't found mad passionate love by the age of twenty-seven."
"Haven't we been dating?" I asked unseen in the dark car, "Most evenings, you're in my apartment or I'm in yours. People date to get to know each other. You know me better than most people know their spouse."
She nodded and continued to stare out the windshield at the blowing snow streaking through our headlight beams.
"Dating is different. You open yourself to the other person. We haven't done that. We're somewhere between close friends and friends with occasional benefits," she said with arms crossed while looking out the fogged side window.
I wanted to shout in frustration that she hadn't opened herself to me, but there was no sense trudging down that old rut. She was not into me the way I was into her. I had come to grips with it. Moving on was my only real option, and yet here I sat at her feet like a little whipped puppy begging for a crumb of attention.
"You know I'm crazy about you, I've been since college," I began since I never listened to my own advice, "but you friend-zoned me a long time ago, and have kept me there. What changed?"
Flor and I discovered each other in college and stuck together because our needs dovetailed. She was the product of the Child Protective Service by way of an abusive family, and was unusual in that she had shown enough talent and initiative in high school to win scholarships. So at the age of eighteen she was cast adrift in the academic sea without family or friends to fall back on.
I, on the other hand, had spent the first eighteen years of my life living with a verbally abusive father who had drummed into me that I was stupid and useless despite the protestations of my mother, grandmother and my teachers. In defense I turned inward living among books and ideas that never judged and always welcomed me with open arms.
In the bare knuckle town where I grew up, that marked me as a nerd. It took ten years of fist fights to prove that nerds can kick butt. I, too, had no home to go to as long as dear old dad was there.
The traffic light changed and we fish tailed a little as we turned the corner.
In retrospect it seemed natural that Flor and I glommed on to each other our Freshman year and created an instant family free of the abuse that had figured in our young lives, nor was it unusual that we were cautious about who else we committed to. Battered hearts learn to love slowly. We gave each the other the family we craved. Who else did we have to share our holidays with? Closeness grew between us that surpassed any casual friends we made, and we thrived up to a point. Then things didn't change for a very long time.
They did change for me recently when I discovered a vague anger about how Flor treated me and unhappiness about the hold she had on me. Why couldn't I let go and move on? I was ready for commitment, in fact, I craved it. Flor had frozen our relationship in a weird place where we were more than friends yet less than lovers.
I remember as a kid seeing the totem pole in the center of my home town. It was erected to honor the Indian tribe that once lived there. At the very top of that totem pole sat a turtle that fascinated me. I wondered how a turtle would manage to get to the top of a pole and more importantly how it would manage to get down. I began to identify more and more with that turtle as my relationship with Flor progressed.
I had a crazy double major in college studying both engineering and Chinese. People thought me insane at the time, but it had worked out well. I translated Chinese technical documents into English for a living. My business had grown along with my reputation for clear unbiased translations.
The traffic light ahead changed to amber and there was no way I was stopping so we plowed through the intersection on a red light. Thank God the traffic was light.
"Oh God, Oh God, Oh God," Flor chanted as we careened through the intersection.
When the money began rolling in, I saw myself as attractive to women for the first time. As a thread bare student surviving on ramen and peanut butter while working my way through college, I had considered myself a bookish wing-man at best. Now women sought me out despite my very average looks.
I should be happy, but still, I harbored a lurking passion for Florence, and the weird part was I could find no reason why. She was smart, she worked as a CPA, but I had dated smarter women. She was tall, and well proportioned, but I wouldn't call her a raving beauty. She was sweet at times, but frosty more and more. Emotional abuse had crept back into my life.
Still, a body wants what a body wants and she was who I chose to spend my time with. My perfect winter evening was cuddling with her underneath a shared blanket as we watched a movie from my couch. I thrived on the closeness and the warmth of those intimate moments. She was my family and I was hers except when she found a new boyfriend. Then she would be gone until things didn't work out. When she dragged herself back to me I welcomed her.
She had a beautiful full head of honey brown hair that cascaded past her perfect shoulders and down onto her back and breasts. Her voluptuous figure attracted male attention wherever she went. She claimed her hips were too wide, but I thought them womanly.
"I'm going to be twenty-eight in a couple of months, and I've decided that it's time I settled down and started a family. I want it all." she turned to me, "I can't think of a nicer, more congenial person to settle down with than you."
I considered her less than amazing proposal. The word 'congenial' stuck in my craw. A friend of a friend had thrown herself at me this evening at the bar going so far as to punch her number into my phone which she found laying on the table. Flor picked up my phone afterwards and deleted the woman's name and number. At the time, I thought Flor was looking out for me so I wouldn't end up with a 'mess in a dress'.
Now I wondered if Flor was as trapped as I was. While she couldn't love me, she couldn't let me go either. The thought nagged at me that Flor had settled for me because she hadn't found anyone better. I had just enough self respect to realize I didn't want to be her consolation prize.
Love is complicated. I had boundless love and gratitude for Flor. She had been in my life for ten mostly wonderful years. She had stood beside me as I had stood beside her. I didn't know what proportion of my feelings for Flor was love and what proportion was gratitude. Was I mixing the two up?
The car in front of me was doing five miles per hour wandering from lane to lane on the snow covered road. I tried to get around him a couple of times, but he was too erratic and the streets were too slick to get past him. I dropped way back on him and allowed him to set the pace.
"That's an interesting proposition, but I didn't hear the word 'love' in the reason why you want to marry me," I offered trying to keep the snark out of my voice.
I'm an engineer. We are not known for our subtlety.
Anger flashed in her eyes. "Of course I love you. Who nursed you through covid?"
"You did," I admitted.
"Who let you stay in my apartment rent free when you were starting out in business?"
"You did," I replied.
"How can you possibly wonder if I love you?"
"Because you don't say it."
I kept my eyes on the snow covered road. Sliding into a truck worried me more than our relationship sliding into the ass end of discord.
"All right,"she turned to me leaning against the passenger side door and looked me straight in the eye, "I love you."
"And I love you," I replied barely stopping the car in time at an intersection as a tanker slid through on the slushy pavement blaring its air horn. He clipped the car in front of me and sent it spinning through the intersection and into a pile of snow left by the plows.
The only sound inside the car was the heater blowing even more hot air between us as the tanker disappeared into the gloom. Flor remained calm, too calm. She hadn't even seen the tanker or the car that was hit.
I analyzed her 'I love you'. Her inflection rose at the end as if there was a 'but' that she had bitten off to keep it from tumbling out. Was I being hyper critical? Hell, yes. The truth was that I didn't trust her to remain true to me if a better man came along.
She was a CPA, after all. She had been trained to evaluate investments and get rid of under performing assets. I often wondered if she applied that logic to dating having gone through dozens of men after college.
That made me the dependable investment with good, but not spectacular yields. Meanwhile I as an engineer was trained to avoid catastrophic failure through rigorous testing.
When we drove past the car, the driver was out and looking at the damage.
Product testing to prevent a marriage failure; now there was an idea. I dismissed it as a dumb idea, but the more I thought about it, the more logical it sounded. Could I failure-proof a marriage through product testing?
We pulled into the parking lot of our apartment building busting through the ridge of snow left by the snow plow across the entrance.
"I'm beat right down to my socks," Flor mumbled as she buttoned her winter coat and pulled up her hood, "I'm calling it a night. If you come over at ten tomorrow, I'll make breakfast."
She leaned over and gave me a kiss. There wasn't a lot a passion to it, but then exhaustion frequently trumps passion at the end of a long hard work week. Neither of us liked going out after work on Fridays. Exhausted twenty somethings clogged the bars and restaurants pushing against a week's worth of fatigue to party because it was the start of the weekend, dammit.
I had turned into a bit of a foodie. I loved seeking out exotic restaurants and sampling food I had never tasted before. You can't do that on Friday nights. The restaurants are teeming with impatient people grumping at harried wait staff who in turn scream at the cooks who take short cuts. We preferred dining and drinking in the more refined atmosphere of Saturday or Sunday evenings.
At my apartment, I crawled out of my work clothes and into sweat pants and a flannel shirt and settled down in front of my computer.
There were times when Flor had been downright cruel to me. It wasn't often, or for very long, still it happened. Usually it was when she had a new boyfriend and I had none. Mostly she flaunted her new boyfriend in front of me. I didn't understand it or much care for it, but she passed through them quickly.
What would something like that morph into inside a marriage? Maybe product testing a marriage wasn't such a bad idea. There were no stress calculations for couples the way there were for bridges, still putting couples into stressful situations to see how they reacted had merit. What would happen if I put my fiancee into a temptation rich setting?
I typed into the computer's search bar 'cruises for single professional people' and pored over the options. I wanted to put Flor into a target rich environment as they say in the Air Force and see how she performed. A couple websites seemed to fit, and I ear-marked them.
