During my teenage years, one of the regular purgatories was attendance at country dances. The format for these was that individual groups would gather in advance at someone's parents' house and then set out for the dance, which would be at some large establishment and could involve several hundred people. And we would lurch through a sequence of Scottish reels and waltzes, the boys in each group scrupulously taking turns to dance with all the girls. For me, intensely shy and socially inept, with no conversation, these occasions were awful. So it was a relief to meet a quiet girl, D, who seemed about as shy and quiet as I was. Every now and then we would find ourselves in the same group at one of these events, and it was a pleasure dancing (quietly) with her.
This pattern of chance meetings at dances went on for six or seven years. We may have met on occasion at other social events, but that was it. Really. We didn't ever go out together.
Then one day I got a call from her asking if I could come round to her house. I suppose by now I was about nineteen or twenty, and getting a bit hippy and arty in appearance, in fact probably downright shabby. Anyway, I went round as asked, and D very solemnly told me that she had met someone - an Australian sheep farmer - and she was going to marry him and live miles away from civilisation in the Australian outback. I offered my congratulations, as you do, and after some chat she left the room. At which point someone, an uncle of hers I think, leaned over to me and hissed: "she's going to marry a REAL man!" I thought at first that was just a remark about my long-haired appearance. And then with an awful horrifying clarity I realised that what he actually meant was: "... and NOT YOU." D had obviously been carrying a serious torch for me all these years and I guess had assumed that I had felt the same for her, and that our futures were intertwined. It was like being ducked in ice-cold water. I had been rejected without ever realising I was a suitor. I slunk away feeling disgraced and somehow guilty - had I been leading her on?
Putting aside the fact D will have had a far better marriage to the sheep farmer than she could ever have had to me, the answer has to be that I was just too self-centred and stupid to be aware of what might have been going on. But it has brought home to me the corrosively selfish nature of shyness - in concentrating so much on one's own inadequacy, one is blind to the feelings of others. At the very least I should have sensed what she was feeling.
