The dis­cus­sion in this Nice Guy™ thread over at Alas reminded me of some­one I had not thought about in a very long time, a woman – I’ll call her Kim – with whom I was close friends in col­lege, whom I lost as a friend after she decided to marry a man I was con­vinced was no good for her, not because I dropped her as a friend, but because she dropped me. We’d been class­mates, but not more than that, in sixth grade and had not seen each other until we met again as Eng­lish majors dur­ing our sopho­more year in col­lege. I have no mem­ory of how we became close friends, but we did, quickly, and, even­tu­ally, I wanted very much to turn that friend­ship into some­thing more.

I don’t remem­ber if I ever told Kim how I felt. I do remem­ber, how­ever, very clearly when she told me how she felt about me. We were at a beach not far from cam­pus and she had just come out of the water and plopped down on her stom­ach. We started talk­ing, most prob­a­bly about some­thing we were read­ing for class, when sud­denly Kim sat up and faced me. “You know, Richard,” she said, “you’re like a brother to me.” I don’t remem­ber what, if any­thing, I said in response, though it was cer­tainly not what I wanted to hear. Still, our friend­ship was far more impor­tant to me than the pos­si­bil­ity of a sex­ual rela­tion­ship which might end up not work­ing out, so I swal­lowed my dis­ap­point­ment and accepted her, and loved her, as the inti­mate friend I assumed she was say­ing was the only thing she ever wanted to be to me.

Before Kim met the man she mar­ried, she had one boyfriend that I remem­ber, a guy I thought was a jerk long before they became a cou­ple, not so much because he was arro­gant, though he was, but because he epit­o­mized that arro­gance, at least this is how I remem­ber feel­ing about it back then, by braid­ing and bead­ing his hair in imi­ta­tion of Bo Derek’s hair­style in the movie 10. The semes­ter Kim went out with him, she also moved to a dorm across cam­pus nearer to where he lived. In fact, she might have done that to be closer to him, but I am not sure. Once – and this is what con­firmed him in my mind not just as a jerk but as a true ass­hole – he came back with her to her old dorm room to pick up some things. I walked by the open door on my way to leave a note on another friend’s door down the hall, saw them out of the cor­ner of my eye as I passed and fig­ured I would pop in to say hello on my way back. At first, I didn’t think they’d seen me, but then, when I was still just a cou­ple of doors down from where they were, I heard him say, “See, I told you that once you moved across cam­pus, he’d for­get about you.” I put the note on my other friend’s door and hur­ried back, but by the time I got there, Kim and her boyfriend were gone.

I know she even­tu­ally broke up with that guy – it’s funny, I remem­ber his name, first and last – and that she, too, decided he was a jerk; and I have mem­o­ries of going to at least one clas­si­cal music con­cert with her dur­ing our senior year (if I remem­ber cor­rectly, she played the vio­lin) and of there being that night what I thought might have been some sex­ual ten­sion between us, though noth­ing came of it. Indeed, I didn’t even real­ize it might have been sex­ual ten­sion until the fol­low­ing day, and then it con­fused me because it was so at odds with the sub­stance of our friend­ship; and I remem­ber how ambi­tious she was as an aspir­ing jour­nal­ist and how much I respected the integrity of her pol­i­tics and her belief that she could make a real dif­fer­ence in the world. Mostly, though, I remem­ber how much I liked being with her. Just being with her. She laughed a lot, and I don’t think there was any­thing we could not talk about. Her friend­ship enriched my life, plain and sim­ple. It made me happy, and I was deeply grate­ful for that.

Then, in our senior year, a speaker came to cam­pus, a man who’d writ­ten a tremen­dously pop­u­lar book on “how to woo and win a woman.” The school news­pa­per assigned Kim to cover his talk, and when she did – at least this is my mem­ory of the story she told me the next day – she asked him dur­ing the Q&A about some­thing that, if true, would call into ques­tion the valid­ity of his claim to be the kind of man who could write the kind of book he’d writ­ten and be taken seri­ously. His response, in front of the entire audi­ence, was to invite her out to din­ner that night with the rest of the press, where he promised he would answer her ques­tion. At the din­ner, he offered to give her an exclu­sive, pri­vate inter­view back in his hotel room. She went with him. At some point, if I remem­ber cor­rectly what she told me, I guess it became clear to her that he was inter­ested in giv­ing her a good deal more than an inter­view and she asked him to take her home, or to call a taxi. He refused and she ended up hav­ing sex with him that night.

When she told me this, I was, for obvi­ous rea­sons, hor­ri­fied, and I told her so, and I pleaded with her not to see him again. Even if she did not think that what he did was date rape, I said – because she didn’t – a man who behaved like that was not some­one she ought to trust; but she did not lis­ten to me, and she started going out with him. This inevitably meant that she and I saw less of each other, though we still talked on the phone pretty fre­quently, and then, after what seems in my rec­ol­lec­tion to have been a very short while, and I mean a very short while, she told me he’d pro­posed mar­riage and that she was think­ing of accept­ing. I asked her if she loved him, and while she did not say no, she very point­edly did not say yes. I don’t know how much time passed before she agreed to be his wife, but she did finally do so, and that was the end of our friend­ship. I remem­ber try­ing to call her, to write her, but she did not respond at all. I was not sur­prised not to be invited to the wed­ding. Sev­eral years after we grad­u­ated, I was talk­ing with some­one who had also been her friend when we were in col­lege, and he said that she’d told him she wanted to cut out of her life com­pletely any­one she’d known dur­ing her col­lege years. She didn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him why.

I googled Kim’s name today and was sur­prised to dis­cover, given her one-time desire to be a writer, that she has almost no online pres­ence. There are a cou­ple of ref­er­ences to her and her hus­band, recent enough that I assume they are still mar­ried, and a cou­ple of scanned arti­cles she wrote for our col­lege news­pa­per back when we were under­grad­u­ates. I read them wist­fully, remem­ber­ing the strength of her voice and of her char­ac­ter. I hope – despite every­thing that what I have writ­ten here implies about the man she mar­ried, because I would wish her noth­ing less – that her mar­riage has been a good one, happy and chal­leng­ing in all the right ways, and most of all lov­ing; and I hope that she has found ways of mak­ing her life as mean­ing­ful as she once thought being a jour­nal­ist would make it; mostly, though, I wish there was a way I could find out if those hopes are true, because I never had the chance to say good­bye to her, to grieve the loss of her as a friend, and I guess I would also like the oppor­tu­nity to tell her that a part of me still misses her.