The Mating Game

By Dick Sonnichsen
Reader Contributor

And God said, “It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18), thus, initiating mating rituals that remain today — men and women engaged in sometimes intimidating dramaturgy to attract a potential spouse. 

My own experience with these primitive customs was a prolonged, depressing, existential crisis with large doses of uncertainty and perplexity that had a numbing effect on my mind and body. Through high school, college, post-college work and military time, I experienced a poverty of romantic encounters due to serial residency in predominantly male environments. 

I began my odyssey with the opposite gender in high school as a sexually bewildered, pubescent teenager. My libido was awakened and raging hormones took up residency in my mind, devouring all common sense and any pragmatic brain cells separating reason from ignorance. In my senior year, I dated one girl in particular on a fairly regular basis, but she started college, discovered a law student and unceremoniously dumped me. 

Women one. Me zero.

I enrolled at the University of Idaho and quickly discovered I was attending an essentially all-male school. The gender selection ratio was overwhelming in favor of females — four men for every woman. One bizarre and humiliating ritual of the extraordinarily byzantine college dating culture was the coke date. Women would agree to meet potential partners at the Student Union Building for a coke, conversation and a diagnostic evaluation designed to determine if you were deserving of their companionship. I learned I had a low threshold for rejection and its associated pain and quickly abandoned the practice.

I didn’t own a car, was not an athlete, thespian, musician or member of a fraternity. As a forestry major, I wandered the campus outfitted in a plaid shirt, jeans and work boots, fully conversant in the adverse effects of fungi and insect infestations on timber stands. Hardly Mr. Excitement.  

Finding a date for the Foresters’ Ball was a humbling and exasperating experience. As you might imagine, this dance was not the No. 1 stellar social occasion on the fall party circuit. I finally asked a girl who was dating a friend of mine and she agreed after I assured her that foresters wore suits and ties to dances.   

My nearly nonexistent romantic life further deteriorated after college. After receiving my degree in forestry, I was hired by a lumber company, which consigned me to the woods during the week with loggers and trees as my only companions. Wandering the forest came to an abrupt halt one day when I was drafted into the Army, but there was little change in my romantic life. Loggers and trees were replaced with soldiers and rifles, the forest with living and eating in all-male military bases far from urban populations and women. 

About a year after my assignment to Fort Bragg, N.C., a fellow soldier asked me if I wanted to accompany him to Baltimore for a New Year’s party. He was dating a girl he met there and she had a friend who wanted to have a party but was without a date. I had reluctantly concluded that finding a mate was an intrinsically unreachable goal; but, still desperate for feminine attention, I eagerly accepted his invitation.  

The dateless party-giver’s name was Sally. She easily met my first criterion — female — but there was so much more. She was attractive, tall, slender, vivacious, charming, smart and gregarious, with an elevated tolerance for lonely, quirky soldiers. Fortunately, she was also dork dyslectic. My world suddenly became unbelievably wonderful.

It was probably not love at first sight, but certainly intense like. Submerged in joyful emotion, I was unconditionally smitten with her, captivated by her intense gravitational pull. I was experiencing a rush of desire. She, on the other hand, had a much higher threshold for “smitteness.” Her affection dispenser was slower to respond. 

Since Baltimore was a six-hour drive and a three-day pass away, we had a truncated version of courtship. After a year of dating long distance using the now-primitive communication modes of handwritten letters and phone calls from a booth near my barracks — whenever I could find enough quarters to feed the ravenous pay phone — I mustered out of the Army and suggested we get married. She was reluctant. I was unemployed, and she was feeling a responsibility to complete a Peace Corps commitment to teach English in Ethiopia for two years,

During Peace Corps training, she had begun knitting a sweater for me. On the plane ride from New York to Madrid, her fellow volunteers asked what had become of “Blue Sweater.” She informed them of my marriage proposal and they convinced her to return and get married. 

My tortuous journey of involuntary celibacy was over. She deplaned in Madrid and returned to fulfill my dreams, which she still does 59 years later.

Dick Sonnichsen is a longtime Sandpoint local and author of several books.