Helena Mary Cole

When I was a teenager and into my late 20’s, I weighed about 120 lbs, at about 5’ 4” tall, had long, natural red hair (in my college years, I wore it short, though) and was generally considered a pleasant, agreeable person. Some may have even told you the adjective “pretty” applied to me reasonably well. Yet no one pursued me romantically until I was 29 years old.

Many girls who weren’t so very much prettier than I was had all had boyfriends and were in a fair way to be married in their 20’s. When I was a preteen girl, I can remember thinking how ashamed and embarrassed I would be if I got to the ripe old age of 23 and was still unmarried. You know how it is when you’re 13 and you think you’re going to have your whole life figured out by the time you’re 20. But anyway, there I was, with my 20’s ripening fast, then on cusp of disappearing, and I had NEVER even been on a date yet. I suffered an awful lot of suspense about whether or not I was ever going to be married and have family, as I dearly wished to do. Honestly. “I declare, I don’t know what the young men were about.”

Woah. Where did that sentence come from? I haven’t read any Jane Austen in months.

I had more than one friend who would try to comfort me by telling me that I wasn’t missing much when it came to dating, especially when it came to breaking up. A painful breakup will cause a friend to look at someone who’s never experienced that pain and say things like, “You’re so lucky! Don’t be disappointed that you’re not playing the field, Laney, it really sucks.”

Yeah, don’t say things like that. That’s my advice. If someone in your life has never gone through a particular pain that you’re going through, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lucky. Nobody’s life is easy; nobody’s life is pain-free. I mean, I get it: breakups are hard. But from my perspective, I was thinking, “At least you’ve had a romantic relationship. At least you’re able to talk to guys.” I’ve had a friend or two who never seemed to have much trouble getting boyfriends but because those relationships always ended, they tended to look on dating as a waste of time, and look how lucky I was not to be wasting my time in the same way.

I don’t think I was especially lucky that way. True, I didn’t go through the pain of breaking up, but the pain of never having been pursued romantically is nothing to be sneezed at. It can go uninterrupted for a long time, in my case, for 16 years (counting from my first crush at age 13). The pain of a bad break-up alleviates when you find someone new, I imagine. What if there is no finding someone new because there’s never been “someone old” to begin with? People would smile in the face of my despairing that I would ever get married, but really, it was pretty hard to hope that someday someone would even date me when no one ever had. The idea had never broken the barrier between fantasy and reality. Evidently, there’s a lot more to getting a boyfriend than being reasonably pretty and agreeable, but whatever that was, I could neither define nor figure out how to acquire.

Also, dating is not a waste of time. It does build skills, skills that I entered adulthood entirely lacking. I had no idea how to get a romantic relationship started, or even send the necessary signals to encourage a young man into thinking his pursuit would be well-received. Most kids figure that out when they’re teenagers, and those skills develop as years go on, as romantic partners come and go, and so those people are in a much better position to get a potential marriage relationship off the ground when they get to be adults than I was.

I’ve since learned that having romantic relationships while young is also instrumental in building self-confidence. From my perspective, that makes sense. Self-confidence is something I’m not exactly overflowing with now, but when I was a teenager, it was virtually non-existent. As a preteen, I could hardly even look up from the floor. Appropriate eye contact was a big enough issue when I wasn’t nervous, but eye contact with guy who made my stomach flutter and my heart pound? I’m not sure it ever even happened. The idea that I was giving social signals that were confusing to guys, perhaps confusing enough to inspire them to pass over me for the equally pretty, smiling girl beckoning him with her easy-to-understand, warm and encouraging eye contact/body language/social cues, had never entered my consciousness. I had absolutely no awareness of this.

Yeah. That’s what autism is. I never went on a date until I was 29? AHA! There’s my autism.

I mean, in my case, that’s one of the manifestations of my autism.

For some years before I met Mr. Cole, I figured that I wasn’t going to date until I met someone who wasn’t going to be scared away by A LOT of social awkwardness, and I mean a lot. I mean someone who would understand that I had never yet stepped off of square one and had close to no idea of what was expected of me in terms of dating. Mr. Cole could tell you exactly how awkward I was. He was really determined to date me if he possibly could, and overlooked little incidents like me misunderstanding what he was doing when he reached over to take my hand for the first time, and passing him a piece of beach trash instead of putting my hand in his. I don’t know what to tell you. No one had ever tried to hold my hand while walking on the beach before, and my autism makes it really hard for me to read signals in the first place.

It’s funny now.

For whatever reason, he also wasn’t put off by other things like our first kiss being entirely one-sided (and I mean entirely – I don’t know why I didn’t even think to pucker up a little) and my not being able to converse, hardly at all, with his family members on meeting me. And for the better part of ten years after having met me.

This is definitely a case where having natural read hair trumped a lot of things, and you know, Mr. Cole had named his car at the time after Princess Fiona from Shrek, even though it was a stick-shift.

I don’t like to think how things would have turned out if my hair had been brown.