Why Dating Didn't Work

Last week I wrote a story that illustrated I wasn’t a total wimp when younger. I could—when push came to shove—speak up for myself. As the psychiatrist in St. Paul said many years later, “Dee, you have the deepest sense of survival of anyone I’ve ever worked with.” I think I felt my survival being threatened by that first Dayton psychiatrist. He set up roadblocks to my surviving in a new environment.

         As I indicated at the end of that posting, I soon found a second psychiatrist. I want to tell you about that experience, but before doing so, I need to share with you my life outside work those first months after I left the convent.

The Loretto Guild

         This past April I described the Loretto Guild where I lived for the first few months of 1967. While there, I met four young women who became friends. Like me, they worked in downtown Dayton. Unlike me they hadn’t been in the convent, so they were younger than I—all in their early twenties. But in the ways of the world they were so much more sophisticated and knowledgeable.         

         These four women—all different just as the women in the convent had been—helped me settle into the life of a single young woman in a bustling city. I have such good memories of our laughter each night when we went out to local restaurants for supper or settled in the lounge of the Loretto to watch television and gab.

“Dance at Bougival” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

         With them I went to the local dances sponsored by the Catholic Church in a Dayton auditorium. It was there I met two men in their thirties who asked me out on dates. Hesitant, shy, awkward—I was all of these and more. Inarticulate often, I was inept at carrying on a conversation with a man. I still carried with me the fear of the neighbor who’d molested me for three months in fifth grade. (Click here and here if you’d like to read that story.)

         Since I was ten, that fear had pervaded my entire response to men. It—and the acne I’d had in my teens and twenties—had been the reason I’d done so little dating in high school and college. Now I had to move beyond that fear and accept dates with these men and . . . let them kiss me goodnight after a movie or supper. Yet I so feared that one of them would clutch my breast or move his hand up my thigh.

         Here I was, thirty-one years old, no longer ten. I’d studied psychology in college. I’d been in the convent where, especially in Omaha, I’d learned to be resolute when faced with difficult situations.

A 1966 Volkswagen Beetle.

         But in the darkness of a car on a residential street at eleven at night, I lost my certainty that I could say no if one of these men tried to go beyond where I felt comfortable. And so, when one of them would pull up at the curb before the residence where I was living, I’d clutch my purse and say, “Thank you,” while hurriedly opening the car door. I’d almost run up the sidewalk to the residence door, behind which safety beckoned.

         As you must already suspect, the men gave up on me. My conversation was forced. My response to sexual overtures was awkward. My confidence in myself was nil. I must have been—I’m quite sure of this—a dismal date!

         So I stopped going to the dances. I stopped dating. And instead I went to night school to learn more about literature. I could hide in a book.

All photographs from Wikipedia except for the Loretto Guild, which is from the Dayton Library Postcard Collection.