No Pressure Over Cappuccino

My good friend Simon closed a door last week, but little did he know that several windows were about to be opened for him.

As Simon went shopping for stationary supplies with his friend Teresa, an errand that he actually enjoyed, the last thing on his mind was dating. Apparantly though, the same could not be said of his female friend.

“Let’s go for coffee”, Teresa suggested. Never one to decline an opportunity to sit down and catch up properly, Simon agreed that it was, indeed time for coffee. And sandwiches. As their orders arrived in a hip café contained within a period building downtown, Teresa stood. “Oh my god, hi!” she announced as one of her friends—good-looking, definitely—appeared at the tableside.

Simon sighed. A lunch interrupted sometimes felt like someone walking in on you having sex with your lover. It was that sacred. To Teresa, however, no such sacredness existed. “Join us”, she exclaimed. Since when did it become socially acceptable for lunch arrangements to be made without the fellow lunch partner being consulted, Simon had to wonder.

A few short minutes after the good-looking friend had joined, now complete with sandwiches and coffee also, Teresa realised she needed the bathroom. Simon, not known for his shyness, engaged in small talk and a little more with the new person.

“Would you go for a drink sometime?” the new person questioned. If Simon had been the sarcastic self that he is with friends he would have said something along the lines of “Oh, well, I like to go for drinks all the time”, adding atonally “Would this drink be something specific?” But Simon had good manners, and knew that while a drinks invitation over cappuccino meant that Dublin had come along, it may not be ready for sarcasm with strangers. Obliging the offer, Simon started to wonder where his original lunch partner had got to—it had been fifteen minutes, after all.

The new person didn’t seem phased. Simon wondered if maybe Teresa, head in toilet, required assistance. And then everything fell into place. Teresa, it seemed, felt that it was Simon who required assistance; in arranging a replacement for his recently departed Beloved. Or was it the good-looking friend who she was trying to help out?

As Teresa walked back to the table, casually, she remarked, “I’m so sorry, I was just so distracted by the new furniture downstairs…amazing”. Deciding against protesting against the arranged lunch date that had just occurred thanks to Teresa, Simon finished his sandwich.

Maybe it was the coffee, or perhaps it was the sight of the good-looking friend and the idea of drinks together that had required no effort on his part, but Simon decided that today; he was ready for whatever Dublin had to throw at him.

The Reason to Rebound

They say that as one door closes, another opens. They also say that when you’ve split up with a partner, you should give yourself time to grieve its loss. I had to wonder, were ‘they’ perhaps generalising a little too much? Surely everything depends on individual circumstances.

One of my best friends, we’ll call him Simon, recently split with his partner. He didn’t feel the need to lock himself indoors for exactly half the duration of the relationship--that’s how long ‘they’ say it takes to get over someone properly--Simon felt that one and a half years would be too long a period to stay indoors. I had to agree.

On our first encounter since the split, a delve-in-deep conversation was likely to occur, but due to being in company, the content was monitored. Post-break-up discussion can be violent, and we understood that others in our lives not aware of each scenario that had taken place internally over the past three years, may be caused to run scared.

We did, however, discuss rebound, and the possibilities of introducing this powerful ingredient into the recipe of loss of relationship recovery. I, on one hand, love the concept of the rebound. If, like Simon and I, you are prone to returning to situations that are bad for you, the rebound can take you so far out of the said situation that not only do you completely forget its existence, you wonder what its relevance was in the first place.

On the other hand, the last time I rebounded, mere minutes after a VPB (Very Public Break-up), I somehow landed in a one-and-a-half year relationship. I still don’t know how it happened. I’m very aware that I didn’t chase this person, and so I think that the lack of chase perhaps has from time to time made me wonder how this person is here, opposite me, in life. It’s sort of like going out for drinks, becoming incredibly drunk, and finding yourself at home in bed. An ingredient is absent, and yet the final product tells you otherwise.

Either way, I entertained the idea of a rebound for Simon, but did not encourage it. Simon, in his mind, knew that there were other future relationship prospects outside of ‘the situation’ but his heart did not allow his mind to validate this thought. I got to thinking, “why, must the heart be honoured with such authority and opinion?” A rebound was the only way for the heart to be brought in sync with the mind, I concluded.

Three nights later, as Simon documented his weekend to me, sitting in the theatre during the interval of Julius Caesar, I realised that a new door had opened, but more importantly, that the one behind him had finally been closed.