#53 THE BACKGROUND OF CAPTAIN THOR, AKA THE FIRST PERSON I MET AT STARBUCKS
My third long-term boyfriend who left his mark (for better and worse)
Captain Thor was my first “real” adult, grown-up, well-earning “boyfriend” in what was technically the start of my “adult” life. The other two “long-term” boyfriends consisted of my high school sweetheart and the tangle of mess that was the Stella Adler Academy Actor, Dorian.
See previous posts here if you’re new and haven’t had a chance to read them (you’ll find more than one post about each).
HSS’s love was suffocating and Dorian’s early infatuation turned to indifference, dislike, and later hate. After Dorian, I casually dated several men for a year or so, fitting in as many experiences as I could manage – so it seems. (And also – I guess – so I could have so much to write about later!)
When I met Captain Thor – the moniker will be clear in the next post – I hadn’t yet finished my Master’s degree. I finished it about 7 months into our “relationship” (or was it a “situationship” as the young people call it?), but I’d moved to Columbus (thanks to Brittany) for an adjunct teaching job at a technical college that accepted my Bachelor’s degree to teach the English 101 and 102 classes with the view that I’d done my MA coursework but not passed the final thesis defence. Of course, I’d already taught for a year by this point as part of my MA, so I was green but had some experience. Read here for what happened the night before I started teaching for the first time.
As I’ve said before, Columbus, Georgia housed Fort Benning1, which had, amongst other “schools” for Army infantry and armour officers, the Maneuver Captains Career Course (MC3). That meant that the Columbus downtown bars, high-end apartment buildings (and neighbourhoods for the officers with families), restaurants, and cafes were frequented by officers. Was I a silly, spoiled Lydia Bennet in Merton seeing a Mr Wickham figure for the first time, giddy with anticipation and excitement?
When thinking of Captain Thor, the whole film concept of He’s Just Not That Into You (I think it was a book too but I didn’t read it) comes to mind. He was into me enough to keep me around to pass the time and we had an overall “nice” relationship but on my end, it was fraught with heartache for a person who said something along the lines of he was trying to see if he had feelings for me but he never did. I thought how can someone spend so much time with me and be indifferent? The whole situation was an ego bruise.
I just finished Dolly Alderton’s Good Material (I loved Jen’s parts in the last bit of the novel the best because it describes a thirty-something millennial life and feelings perfectly – anyway…) and in there, the cute mother character tells her son, Andy, something along the lines of how breakup heartbreak is a sort of rehashing and re-feeling of all past hurts and rejections – all the way back to our primary school days. It feels so painful and raw because it cuts to the core of who we are and it feels like a rejection of us personally. And even if it is actually us that’s the problem and we need work, it takes time to grow. I dug out the actual quote here.
‘Getting dumped is never really about getting dumped.'
'What is it about, then?' I ask.
'It's about every rejection you've ever experienced in your entire life. It's about the kids at school who called you names. And the parent who never came back. And the girls who wouldn't dance with you at the disco. And the school girlfriend who wanted to be single when she went to uni. And any criticism at work. When someone says they don't want to be with you, you feel the pain of every single one of those times in life where you felt like you weren't good enough. You live through all of it again.'
– Dolly Alderton, Good Material
Captain Thor and I were two people who needed…something. I wanted someone to fall in love with me and be charmed by me and stick by me through everything. I wanted the rom-com life with the handsome, successful partner who would tackle life with me, side by side. I didn’t have any of the tools necessary to get that sort of life but I thought I did.
He was heartbroken after his engagement to his “dream girl” ended (in my opinion his “projected dream girl” but I’ll delve into that in another chapter, perhaps). No person was ever going to live up to her. Or the previous girl he’d had a crush on in his native Alaska who was a hippy-dippy granola natural beauty who turned out to be a lesbian.
He held these blonde, petite, healthful beauties as his ideal. I was never going to compete in his eyes. I wasn’t even running the same race. Why did he pursue me? I have no idea. I suppose that’s a question for him. But he kept me around – I expect – as something to do because he knew that eventually, he’d be moving away to his next duty station, which happened to be Fort Bliss, Texas (which all military men say is the opposite of “bliss”).
For all of those women who lived and dated near Fort Benning, they knew that they’d either be “wifed up” or left. I guess I didn’t know this lesson at the time but really, we weren’t a good fit and we both dodged a bullet as it were.
There were plenty of qualities I liked about Captain Thor but there were enough that I didn’t like that we wouldn’t have been compatible long-term partners. I should have cut and run but I didn’t. I suppose we both had our own reasons for being thrust together.
Why did I stay?
Over the approximately ten months we dated, we had fun together. I had a nice place to live with him. We spent time walking in nature, going out to eat, going to movies, bowling, hosting dinner parties and games nights, attending social events like birthdays and Superbowl parties, and travelling – to Savannah, Biloxi (Mississippi), Callaway Gardens, New York, New Orleans (Louisiana), Atlanta, Florida, and other places I may have forgotten. And, once, we even played golf together with a very nice friend of his! I don’t remember the friend’s name now or why we were playing golf, but I do remember buying a golf outfit I couldn’t afford for the occasion and he kindly bought me a matching golf visor. The best part of golf was actually riding around in the golf cart. The whole buying an outfit for an occasion reminds me of a funny story involving my cousin Pam and a tracksuit when she was first dating her husband Dave (I definitely have to tell this story at some point because it’s hilarious).
I liked that he didn’t own a television so we didn’t curl up and watch TV. He said that he didn’t want to watch people live life on television; he wanted to live life – and that wasn’t a bad philosophy. I still think about that philosophy to this day. (Even though my husband loves television and films! But let’s face it, television has improved since 2011. And my husband and I live surrounded by nature so we go for lots of countryside walks in spring and summer.)
Captain Thor’s one-bedroom apartment in a high-end gated apartment complex was immaculate and fully furnished. He’d chosen the furniture himself at an expensive furniture store and we spent most of our time in bed or at the dining room table. He even had expensively framed paintings of photographs of Alaska on the walls. I think he’d paid a lot for massive prints from a local artist in his native Alaska.
Everything was in dark wood and natural greens and browns. It wasn’t my taste but he was certainly “a grown-up” who had purchased actual furniture, not from Ikea (which wasn’t a thing in the US then) and not commandeered it from the side of the road or accepted hand-me-downs like most of the grad students I knew. Mine and Brittany’s apartment was made of furniture from our parents’ homes, stuff given to us, and stuff (yes) picked up off the side of the road (like this oak coffee table I found that Brittany still owned for a while).
Unlike my practically falling-apart Mustang, he had an expensive car. It was a brand new version of the Dukes of Hazzard car (Dodge Charger). I’ve never actually seen the TV show but I think I’d vaguely seen the iconic car. It was also orange and very fancy with leather bucket seats; he was very proud of the purchase. I wasn’t really a car person myself but he had all the trimmings of a successful person – and the car was undeniably nice.
During the time we dated, he probably made it so that I could “afford” a better lifestyle at the time than I could have on my own. As a result, I took the sadness with the good bits. At some point, though, he’d decided I wasn’t for him and I should have let go for my own dignity but I didn’t until it was almost too late.
Before we met, I’d been seeing the hot Jewish doctor on and off casually. We’d dated at first and he ended things (more on this later) but I wasn’t sleeping with anyone and asked for hookups (and boy were they fun – think showing up to his door in a coat and lingerie and him answering with his scrubs on as requested). The sexual encounters were gratifying but I knew they’d end if he ever met someone he had seriously wanted to date.
I always wondered what was wrong with me. Why did no one choose to settle down with me? It was totally me. I was the problem! I didn’t have my life together and relationships like writer Will Storr (the husband of the talented writer
) says are inadvertently about “status” even if we don’t realise it.He wrote a book called The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It – the blurb saying, “A wealth of research shows that how much of it we possess dramatically affects not only our happiness and wellbeing but also our physical health – and without sufficient status, we become more ill, and live shorter lives.” Being surrounded by the right people, having the right amount of money, the right job, the right partner, the right place to live, the right clothes, all of that denotes status – and our craving for status defines who we are.
I never thought of life in terms of status, but I suppose maybe only those with a lot of it or very little of it think about it more. The people somewhere in the middle, perhaps, aren’t confronted with it as often.
As a grad school student, status didn’t matter to me. I mostly dated other students. I knew one grown-up adult man, my bestie Chester. He had a real job and real money and a fancy convertible and treated me to dinner and the theatre and movies. But I didn’t “date” men for any of these reasons. I dated them because they were attractive, mostly, or just happened to be in my trajectory.
As my therapist says, having someone who is handsome and has “status” made me feel important (especially at a time when I was at my lowest) and dating a “doctor” bestowed status I didn’t have – and the same with dating a Captain. The doctor was a Major in the Army and besides the Air Force Guy and the odd few dates, he was probably the first military person I got to know a little. But as a doctor who was into superheroes and drawing, he was not the typical military man. (Bramwell was also military but not active duty and he was a student at the time.)
The brilliant writer,
, recently published a piece that talks about this expectation we all have of finding love: “This narrative, that we are all owed the love of our lives, that we are assigned a soulmate, is woven so tightly around our expectations of modern romance…” and that can lead many women to “shelve” what they want and ignore red flags to settle for a relationship.She says: “...when I have then gotten into a relationship, I’ve ignored so many of the signs, and worse, shelved my own needs in order to make the narrative work – on the surface, at least.” This cycle was exactly the reason I have so much to write about in the “chapters” of the Why We Met journey. I let people choose me and/or I chose people based on all the wrong criteria. I didn’t question if people were a good fit for me, making me happy, long-term compatible, financially, politically, and emotionally aligned. I thought there was something wrong with me if people rejected me or broke up with me or treated me badly.
I think the younger generations are wiser than us elder millennial lot, though. My nutrition coach, David, and my baby sister, Hannah, who are around the same age, have a completely different (and healthier) philosophy to life, health, and dating than I did at that age. They aren’t there going “off the rails” and having drunken, debaucherous nights out for one – and maybe long-term that’s much healthier for the psyche (although I have no regrets – or “ragrats” as I saw on an internet meme tattoo).
The broke grad school cycle
Captain Thor and I met “IRL” and, in a way, he chose me. For reasons that still baffle me, I might add. He chose to find me again, and that was flattering. (In an attempt to keep my posts shortER, that story of how we met will be in the next post.) Unfortunately for me, as I said, he was in no position emotionally to date.
As I invested more time, he continued to act as if asking where things were going was “too serious” and “too much pressure.” What I know now as an actual middle-aged thirty-something person is that I should have cut and run and saved myself the emotional pain. Young people, if your partner says they don’t know, they do know. The answer is not what you want to hear but the lack of an answer is an answer and deep down you know that too! However, if you’ve been following along on my journey, my 20s self was not sensible and just needed therapy.
I was around 24 when I met him and he was 29, having had much more life experience than me. He continually (as was a theme in my first marriage) made me feel as if I was not “good enough” and not achieving my “potential” (he said as much). He didn’t account for our age difference, different life experiences, and the fact that he had built his wealth by joining the military at a young age, making wise financial decisions, and simply being older. He’d been in the military for over a decade and, thus, had a decade of a career behind him and substantial savings. I was fresh out of grad school (or almost) in a downturned economy; I didn’t have a stable career or barely anything more than making ends meet in order to “plan for the future.” I’d not had any years at all of earning an income, so our relative positions and his comparisons were unfair. We had completely different life paths. By the time I was 29, naturally, my life looked completely different than it had five years prior.
It was a time of questioning, of being lost (I say this a lot). Of not knowing my place and what I’d do. I found an email (maybe I’ll explore in a later post) about him telling me I needed some sort of “plan” for financial stability and building my life up but he didn’t “get it.” You can’t plan when you have no stable factors (including no full-time job).
By the time he moved away and we broke up in New York, I’d been working three adjunct professor teaching jobs and as a legal assistant and I was still broke and I had no way to end that cycle – no matter how many jobs I applied to or how many hours I worked. There were hundreds of English majors applying to the same publishing and teaching jobs and clearly I did not have anything special or distinguishable to make me hireable over another candidate.
Some people are stuck in cycles, on the rat wheel, and cannot exit. He made it seem like it was so easy, sitting from his vantage on the top of the hill whilst I was in the valley, looking up.
Of course, I eventually broke that cycle – or my first marriage did – and I’m proud of the life and editorial career I have built since moving back to England (thanks also to Michael’s support) but I’m definitely sympathetic to people who never exit the cycle or take time to build their lives – and young people will feel it more now with lower salaries, higher interest rates, higher house prices, higher cost of living, and fewer jobs available.
When I knew he didn’t see a future for us
I fully knew that he didn’t want to bring me along in his life, which, at the time, was painful and hurtful. But I remember walking with him one day at Coopers Creek Park in Columbus and I’d revealed that I had student loan debt. The way he looked at me was if I’d been entirely irresponsible to pursue a non-free education (like he had with the military GI Bill). I did have scholarships, worked part-time jobs, as well as taking out student loans and perhaps I’d not been as responsible as I could have but I had been in uni for seven years and had needed to live on something. It was a time when everyone pushed that the only way to be successful was to go to uni, so it seemed like a no-brainer. And at eighteen to your early twenties, you don’t have the foresight to think ahead as to what sort of income you’ll earn in the future. At that point, if he’d ever had any glimmer in his mind that maybe he’d see where it went, that iron gate was firmly slammed down. I was not a prospect when not only did I not earn any significant amount of money but I was also in negative territory!
A little side story: when I appalled my therapist
So, in therapy, I told my therapist about how Captain Thor never got me any “real” presents for my birthday, Christmas, and graduation. I said how for my birthday he’d organised this “scavenger hunt.” He scattered the apartment with balloons and I had to follow the clues to each new location to find another clue which eventually led to the grand reveal: an ice cream cake in the freezer. I was disappointed. Of course, he knew that I preferred ice cream cake over real cake and that was sweet, but my beautiful Chinese friend, Anna, who was dating Captain Thor’s friend, Captain Texas, had received a full-on diamond necklace for her birthday and I got a cake! How ungrateful was I? The Christmas before (right after we’d met), he’d also made a gift box of sorts that contained tinsel and chocolates. I was baffled that wasn’t an “actual” present either.
Then, I said how for my graduation, he’d taken the time to frame a picture of Freyja, the goddess associated with love, beauty, fertility, and sex – and all I could think was why the fuck did he get me this painting and what does it even mean? How ungenerous of me. Again. So, when he did get me a physical gift, I was still ungrateful. He even wrote a nice message on the back of it but didn’t sign it “love” so and so (which was another disappointment). Not only could he not love me, he couldn’t even casually write it in his message. I hope I feigned appreciation well enough at the time, though. My mum actually kept the painting because, in my heartbreak, I wanted to expunge my life of everything Captain-Thor-related.
My therapist was absolutely appalled and shocked by this story of mine. Her shock made me re-frame it all. In reality, that scavenger hunt probably meant he spent hours or at least a significant portion of time arranging this surprise. Every gift he gave me was “planned” even if it didn’t have high monetary value. My therapist thought it wasn’t a good reflection of my character that I equated men spending money on me (because they had it or could afford to) with value. I was chastened.
In analysing myself through my writing (and discovering how I got so lucky with my husband), I’d never explored these issues of value, worth, status, and expectation – and it was an eye-opener. In my journey from not caring about status and worth, had I become a horrible person in suddenly realising the benefits of dating men with higher income brackets?
Next up, how I met Captain Thor, aka the first person I met at Starbucks. Was it a meet-cute gone wrong?
Don’t forget to check out the other fifty-two posts I’ve written, including the one on why I’m writing this newsletter/blog in the first place – and the odd “present day snippet” of what I’m up to lately.
Did you ever date someone hoping they’d fall in love with you and value you? Let me know in the comments. Is everything we do in life about status?
Fort Benning seems to have been renamed Fort Moore after Lieutenant General Hal Moore of the book We Were Soldiers. Here’s the Wikipedia page about him. I went into a Wiki-hole and learned all about his wife too and she also seems very interesting. My beautiful friend Jayde works for Wikipedia – shout out!