Girls Will Be Boys

I spent the year of 1998-1999 in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. Like many cities, Baltimore's layout is a grid -- and the safeness of any neighborhood was directly proportional to its distance from the center. I lived in an apartment complex in an intermediate area: if you would walk 10 minutes away from the city center downtown, you'd find yourself among some very handsome homes, but if you would walk 10 minutes in the opposite direction, towards the city's heart of darkness, you'd be in an area which you would be wise to avoid after the sun set.

One evening, I found myself in the AOL chatrooms, engaging in a form of socializing which was then still relatively new to me. As I would do from time to time, I entered a private one-on-one chat with someone I met in the chatroom, on this occasion with a young woman a few years my junior. We spent a pleasant half-hour getting to know each other, and conversing about various topics, and found that we shared many mutual interests.

Since the chatroom in which I met her was the Baltimore chatroom, I knew that she and I likely lived in close proximity to one another, so I took a risk and suggested that we meet at the downtown sports bar for drinks. She immediately agreed, and we started to discuss the logistics of arranging the tête-à-tête.

I don't recall how it emerged, but in the process of making these arrangements, it turned out that my new she was a he! Well! blow! me! down! It seems that I had been unwittingly chatting away with a young man, whom I had believed all along was a woman. And my fellow masculine interlocutor had similarly assumed all along that I was a woman!

How the two of us had managed to chat for ½ an hour without somehow picking up that we were talking to a fellow male, I'm not sure -- this was the only time I can recall myself in the midst of such a muddle. But the moment I learned the true gender of my fellow chatter, of the many thoughts which crossed my mind, the most salient was:

I knew this was too easy!

I mean, striking up a conversation with a completely unknown woman, and winning her over so completely within ½ an hour that she would agree to meet me for drinks then and there? Nuh-uh. This is my real life, not a James Bond movie.

So the two of us shared a laugh of mixed emotions -- bewilderment, amusement and frustration -- and went our separate ways.

Recalling this more-than-decade-old episode, the question only now occurs to me: why didn't we meet after all? Just because the romantic element was now off the shelf, we could have still met in fraternal friendship -- after all, we had clearly enjoyed each other's company. I mean, men do become friends and get together, male bonding and all that.

Was it the disappointment over a promising new romantic relationship dashed to pieces? Was it the embarrassment over the situation? Was it simply obtuseness and narrow-mindedness which prevented the other possibility from even occurring to us? I wonder. I think that today, years later, I recognize the value of friendships, and how precious every friendship is, far more than I did back then, and that in a similar situation today, I would have suggested to my erstwhile Juliet that we get together after all. After all, there would always be the possibility that at the bar, we would overhear two young women seated next to us who had just gone through the same mix-up...