Friend #51 - Keira
Keira is a business contact. We had our first phone call more than a year
ago. She had just started her job
working in the marketing department of an event center and I was the contact on
file. There was something about the
melody of her voice that made me immediately like her. In fact, I think I may have even suggested
grabbing a drink at one point early on…but it was said in passing. I don’t think she took me seriously.
We didn’t meet face-to-face until
April or May of this year, and it was specifically for business as we sat across
from one another in her conference room.
We went through the business at hand and when we were almost done, Keira
made mention of the fact that she was single.
That caught my attention. She is
a beautiful redhead. We are close to the
same age and neither of us have any children.
I’d been wanting to find someone
to go with me to social events for singles and Keira was perfect! We scheduled in some time to meet up for
cocktails in a Sex-in-the-City type restaurant in downtown Chandler.
Surprisingly, Keira has had worse
luck with men than I have. She was
engaged nine years ago but it didn’t work out.
She’s been single ever since.
Some of it was due to her former job.
Keira was a roadie for several big bands including The Eagles, which
meant she was constantly traveling all over the world. She enjoyed the work but it made it difficult
to meet anyone special. She had taken
the job at the local event center so that she could settle down and find true
love…but that wasn’t working out so well.
Like me, she had tried nearly every online dating site out there. She’d been on dozens, if not hundreds, of
dates. No one was the right fit and
after a while, it was just frustrating.
A person starts to imagine there is something wrong with them. And then they get impatient with the people
they meet because it is so frustrating to constantly be on the single girl hamster
wheel.
I knew all this because I was in
the exact same situation.
Over drinks that night, Keira and
I began to think about dating outside of the box. What are things we could do to meet single
men organically? We came up with some
ideas and scoped out a couple of singles groups. We even went to a pool party for singles at
some random person’s house. At that
party, I was sitting next to Keira as she was talking to a very handsome, age
appropriate man. The conversation was
going really well until she asked him about his work travel schedule.
“To be honest,” the man said. “I’m sick of traveling. Mostly, I just want to stay at home.” In my head, I could hear the bullet crackle
as he shot himself in the foot. I knew Keira
was specifically looking for someone who enjoyed traveling.
Then, we both got busy with work,
with life, with meeting new people. I
sort of lost touch with Keira for a while when, out of the blue, I got a
message from her asking me if I’d like to go with her to a speaking
engagement. Of course, I agreed, and
during the back-and-forth conversation, Keira casually mentioned she had been
seeing someone that wasn’t able to attend.
I was intrigued so we agreed to meet up for dinner before the event.
Keira told me in the time we had
been out of touch she’d let the crushing disappointment of online dating get to
her. She’d even shut down all of her
accounts but one that she wasn’t checking regularly. She had finally settled into the notion that
she would be a lonely cat lady for the rest of her life when she got a message
from Simon asking her to coffee. It was
abrupt, but Keira had been doing the online dating thing so long she was tired
of wasting her time building someone into the person she wanted them to be,
only to realize they weren’t anything like the expectation she had for them
when she met them in person. So, Keira
said yes. And as always, she was hopeful
but the repetition and history of her dating life gave her trepidation. She walked into the coffee shop expecting to
be disappointed…but this time it was different.
Simon had been divorced for two
years. He has two children, one in
college and one who is a senior in high school.
He’s Swedish and loves to travel.
In fact, they have so much in common that halfway through their coffee, Keira
stopped him and said she’d like to see him again. And after five weeks of dating, Keira has now
found herself in a committed relationship, something she hasn’t had for a very
long time.
I never set out to make Keira one
of my 52 new friends. Our friendship
evolved so naturally I didn’t even think about it, but that evening as we
hugged goodbye and parted ways in the dark parking lot, I watched Keira walk
away from me. The breeze played with her
long red hair. There was bounce in her
step. She was headed home to pack a
suitcase. Simon was flying her to New
York to take her to see Hamilton on Broadway.
I watched as Keira walked right into her own fairytale, my heart
bursting with happiness for her, as only a friend’s heart could.
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