Single Sided Love at First Sight
Frog wanted to be in love. He soaked in the tales of romance and the magic of the heart like a dreamer ending each day in a pink bubble bath and candles. While the magic was real for him, the math was not. Two divorces, one long-term that ended in several contentious break ups, lots of partners that just didn’t click.
Scorpion didn’t really believe in love as a concept. She was a bit of a nihilist, saw herself as somehow apart from most of humanity, and while not inclined toward women (even as friends) she despised men. Her experiences mounted with a parade of losers who fetishized her sexuality and were borderline abusive.
Frog sought out women who required him to chase them. It was like catnip to a feline, the thrill of the pursuit. Women who either chased him or were simply on-board from the first date were inviting him into a club he found no excitement to join. He debated whether he learned this behavior from the films of John Hughes or from the rotating cast of stepfathers he grew up with but whatever the origin, his love of the quest was as baked in as his starry-eyed view of love itself.
Scorpion had stories of flashing her vagina in kindergarten, of allowing a high school boyfriend to take a host of nude photos of her, of a college boyfriend who thought that S&M play consisted of punching her a lot while having sex. Her meager income came from posing in the nude for photographers and painters and many of those episodes only reinforced her disgust of the male gaze. She lived, rent-free, in a single room within hoarder’s home who gifted her the space after she was running from a bad boyfriend who was effectively homeless and violent.
Frog had taken a year-long break from dating as response to his becoming the kind of man willing to treat women as simply a place to park his cock. Scorpion was in a dance with the aforementioned vagrant boyfriend, breaking up, random sex, then more breaking up in a vicious loop for the past five months.
When Frog caught sight of Scorpion at a party, it was like a small nuclear power plant exploded a few inches from him. Scorpion didn’t even notice him. For Frog, it was fate. For Scorpion, this amphibian fawning over her was no different than the long line of men who saw only her physical beauty as an access point for sex.
Frog found his soulmate. Scorpion had found a way out of her pattern. He asked her to marry him on their third date.
Frog was fully committed and, in that role, devoted himself to accepting Scorpion on her terms regardless of her behavior. He was also fully submerged in the ‘love at first sight’ narrative and doubled down on stories of couples who got married in record time and lasted decades as well as told the tale of their engagement like it was one of those John Hughes screenplays.
When Scorpion refused to flush the toilet because she wanted to conserve water, Frog nodded, smiled, and complied. When Scorpion, out of the blue, exclaimed in the car “Oh my gawd! You’re fat, old, and have bad teeth. What am I doing?!” he nodded, smiled, and brushed it off. When Scorpion’s dispossessed boyfriend trashed her bike on the street and Scorpion explained she hadn’t really broken up with him before their engagement, Frog nodded, smiled, and tried to understand her point of view.
When they went to the airport to fly to Las Vegas for their wedding and Scorpion, in a fit of anger over a hickey on her neck, disappeared in the airport for the three hours of pre-flight hanging out, Frog started to panic. Had he just been dumped? Were they still going to Vegas? What the fuck was going on? Just before they were to board the plane, when Scorpion showed up as if nothing was out of the ordinary, Frog nodded, half-smiled, and wondered but went along with it. Such was his gobsmacked love of both Scorpion and the story of their union.
A pattern started to emerge. Scorpion would do or say something shocking, Frog would express his concern or hurt or anger, Scorpion would stand her ground, Frog would acquiesce.
After some time, Frog seemed physically shorter. It wasn’t that he had shrunk but that he was so often slumped over, staring at his feet, he appeared diminished. The pattern continued and Frog became chipped away, his patience worn thin, his love for Scorpion tested but resolved. He didn’t where the limits of his devotion were, the boundary she might cross that would either break him or catapult him as far away from her as he could get but he suspected it would come some day.
Some day came and he decided to tuck his love away in a box and bury it because to do anything else was the final nail on the coffin of his self respect, dignity and optimism for any sort of future for himself.
Scorpion was shocked. “You knew I was a scorpion all along and then feign surprise?”
“I suppose I did know all along but I hoped—I really hoped—that you could be a frog.”
