In honor of my nine year anniversary with my beloved wife please enjoy a story from our third date.
Just gonna reemphasize that. Our third date. We were still very much getting to know each other. We were virtually strangers.
We had been intending to do a meetup at a nerdy cafe with a group of people, but unbeknownst to us there had been a tragedy in the group and everyone else bailed. My beloved and I made the best of it. We had a nice date. I horrified them by eating sliders in three bites but it wasn’t a deal breaker.
Afterward I was driving us back to my place when a car came up and rear ended me. It was a pretty light bump but I was still like, well. That car hit me, time to pull over and exchange info.
Except the other car decided to instead shoot past me and drive away.
Infuriated, I pursued.
From the passenger seat, a captive on a third date with someone else in control of the car and pursuing strangers into the darkness, my beloved said, “Uh, what’s the plan here?”
“They hit me! We need to exchange information!”
Indeed. I did not have a plan. The plan was that when you hit someone with your car you exchanged insurance information. I would pursue until that happened.
The offending car led us a merry chase and as I followed through winding pitch black forest roads I felt the tiniest inkling of misgiving. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea? Pursuing someone into the darkness? But I persisted.
I wasn’t being propelled by a plan or even stubbornness but instead I followed a blazing righteousness. Fundamentally I knew that when you hit someone’s car you talked to them afterward. It was an inexorable fact. They would not escape the talking portion of this event.
When the car pulled into a trailer park I fully realized that this was not, in fact, a good idea. Inside the other car was a couple who were clearly having an argument and it seemed increasingly unlikely that they had insurance info to swap.
With a sigh I said, “Will you pull out your flashlight? Let’s see if my bumper is damaged.”
We got out of the car and inspected my bumper together. It actually looked fine, and I was about to call it when the woman got out. It was instantly clear she was under some chemical influence, her pupils dilated absurdly large. She attempted a poor performance as she said, “Oh, did we hit you?”
“Yeah,” I said flatly, “but I think it’s fine. I don’t see any damage.”
“We weren’t sure, uh, if we did, we didn’t think we did but we just weren’t sure.” She shifted anxiously foot to foot.
It was time to leave, a fact which became clearer when the man stepped out, eyes buzzing in his skull. He feigned innocence and radiated an aura of someone barely tethered to reality. My beloved and I waved them off and got back in my car to drive away.
As we did my beloved let out a huge gust of air as if they’d been holding their breath.
“Are you okay?”
“I was so squared up ready to fight them,” they said. “I’m glad we didn’t.”
I turned to look at them in astonishment. “Why would we have fought?”
“Are you joking? You followed them at 11pm to a trailer park! The second we got out of the car I was in a fighting stance. What did you think would happen?”
“I- I don’t know. That we’d talk and then go home? But. I can see now that driving after a car that tried to do a hit and run may not have been that safe…”
“You think!!!”
We sat in silence for a while before we burst out in relieved laughter.
“You were ready to fight?” I asked.
“I do kung fu! That guy looked so shady, I was ready to kick his ass, but I really didn’t want to.”
Unbelievably, they agreed to more dates, and eventually married me, but more often than not they’re the one driving.
LOOK! It- It made sense to me at the time! I was like Woops, they’re not following procedure, better make sure we do all the steps!
My beloved did have words with me afterward in which it became clear to them that autism rule compulsion had taken the wheel and that I wasn’t just afflicted with the self preservation skills of a wolf cuddling baby lamb.
