Man On The Rebound Crushes Date

Michelle was so burned by Tim she feels like she leaves wisps of smoke behind her wherever she goes.

“How quickly the mighty may fall,” she says. “Just one month ago I was quietly lording it over my girlfriends that I had a boyfriend and they were all alone.”

Michelle and Tim met on a blind date. Tim was just out of a relationship and his friends had immediately started the fixing-up process.

“Tim couldn’t stand being alone,” is how Michelle reads it. “He went from living with his parents to college, to law school, back to living with his parents, to living with a girlfriend, to living with another girlfriend, to me. Some people end a relationship and hibernate for a while, to lick their wounds, to take stock of their lives. Tim dates one woman right on the heels of the last one. It’s a wonder he never mixed up our names.”

When she met him, Michelle didn’t care that Tim had ended a one-year relationship just three weeks before they got together. He was a great guy: 30, a lawyer, attractive, funny. And he made it clear on their first date that his old girlfriend, Marlene, was out of his system.

“Yes, Tim did talk about her a lot in the beginning, but I was in that nice position of being the listener, the sympathizer, the soother. I could say, ‘Oh, how terrible’ when Tim told me yet another thing Marlene did during their long year together.”

But after a month or so, it seemed like Marlene was starting to intrude into their relationship as more than just a name. One time Michelle and Tim were together when his beeper went off. It was Marlene.

“Tim ignored it. She kept beeping him. She must have beeped him five times in an hour. He didn’t answer it, but he dropped me off a little early that night and I did wonder if he was running home to call her. I’m not stupid.”

Another time, Michelle was over at Tim’s apartment. The phone rang and Tim disappeared into his bedroom with the portable phone. Fifteen minutes later, he reappeared, still talking and gesturing to Michelle to wait. Another 10 minutes went by before he was done. He explained that Marlene was going through a rough time with her mother and he didn’t feel he could just drop her. They were friends.

Calls and beeps became a standard part of Michelle’s dates with Tim. After another month or so the inevitable happened.

“They got back together - duh,” says Michelle. “Tim did call to tell me. I suppose he didn’t have to, since we had only been dating for a brief period. But he did call. He said that he was still hung up on Marlene and that she had used this time apart to straighten out her head. And, oh yeah, he thanked me for being so patient and said something about another time, another place.”

So now Michelle has a new dating rule: Never date a man until he has been out of a relationship a minimum of two months. And the longer his old relationship lasted, the longer you’re going to need to wait until you date him. She has a whole scientific formula about it.

“I have only two regrets. When Tim took that call in his bedroom that night, I should have walked out the door and kept walking. And when he got back together with Marlene, I should have sent him a bill for baby-sitting services.”

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