ANTI-VALENTINE'S DAY CONTEST - Tim's "Fatal-Atttraction" Trauma ...
OK, so, I'm an historical re-enactor. That's kind of an important
part of this story. I'm also a nurse, ex-soldier and a bunch of other
perfectly normal things, but I do have this one slightly off centre
hobby where I dress in clothes about 600 years out of fashion, and
sometimes try to hit people with a very large piece of steel while
dressed as a hood ornament.
Now, some one really needs to write a psychological thesis on the
subject, but for some reason, people dressed in historical clothes
somehow become exempt from the usual social norms regarding sexuality
and appropriateness. If you are dressed and armoured as a Viking and
wandering the streets of central Sydney, women will let you pick them up
and carry them away from their friends without a word of protest. Try it
in everyday clothes and you'd be tasered within seconds, right? And it
works the same for women in armour too. Otherwise normal men respond to
armoured women in bizarre ways that are utterly outside the normal range
of everyday human interaction. I don't know the full explanation for it,
but it just seems to be the way that people are wired.
So I was at a particularly prominent and large mediaeval festival, or
"Fayre" for my American readers. The atmosphere was very immersive, and
members of the public were encouraged to dress the part, while the 400
odd genuine re-enactors performed a range of "Ye Olde" activities around
the grounds and spent the rest of the time wandering about lending an
element of mediaeval colour to the proceedings. Armoured, I'm pretty
cool, if I do say so myself, but my 15th Century civilian clothing is to
die for. Crimson slashed silk doublet over black, thigh high boots with
spurs. And a pearl earring. And so I was wandering around the event one
evening, being dashing and mediaeval and interacting with the general
public as we are encouraged to do. And yeah, I'll admit it, being a
little flirty and taking mild advantage of the aforementioned
"sexuality/appropriateness disconnect" that seems to take place when
women are talking to a guy dressed a bit like Colin Firth in
"Shakespeare in Love".
Here comes the disaster bit. After having fought and wandered and given
two lectures, by the evening I was getting a bit weary and sat down for
dinner at one of the many stalls selling food. There was a group of
young ladies nearby, and playing the part, I engaged with them, in
character, and we all sat around talking, laughing and mildly flirting
for about an hour. Seconds after they left, one of them came racing back
and whispered "Our friend really likes you, here's her email address"
and thrust a folded piece of paper into my hand, then ran after her
friends. Well, so far, so good right? Nothing boosts the ego quite like
having someone give you her number unsolicited, and I was quite pleased.
But when I got home, the first time I checked my email there was already
an email waiting for me from this young lady. She had been onto the
festival's webpage and found my details there. I still managed to feel
flattery in response to this, and after all, her email was incredibly
nice and a little apologetic at taking such a step unsolicited, and she
was cute and had seemed bright and funny when we chatted, so I replied
and we sent a few emails back and forth. Mildly flirty, but again, only
a few, and when the first nude photos of her showed up in my inbox,
several alarm bells went off in the back of my mind, which, being male,
I ignored.
"Wow, how much of a stud are you that some woman you barely know is
sending you naked photos of herself?" Big self congratulatory grins and
self backslaps all round, voices of caution firmly ignored, I got a
little bit more flirty, and in response, she went into utter overdrive.
The nude photos, which had started out as flirty and artistic, became
progressively more explicit, until they were soon the sort of thing that
I think may even be illegal in Amsterdam. Still flattered, but finding
the voice of caution getting louder by this time, I thought it prudent
to discuss with her exactly what she thought she was doing. It was
around this time that terms like "love at first sight", "soul mate" and
"marriage" were first uttered.
Now, I'm no cad, I don't lead people on
with no intension of following through, and I'm certainly not a user of
the "find 'em, fuck 'em forget 'em" school or any such, but this was a
whole other order of magnitude beyond anything I had even considered.
And so, attempting to be as diplomatic as possible, I politely declined
any further conversation. At this point, its still a funny anecdote.
When she hacked my email account, character assassinated me on a number
of online forums and associations I was a member of, it stopped being
funny. When she out of the blue called my mother... my MOTHER! who she
told an amazing story about how I had led her on, "made love to her" (I
never even kissed her!), got engaged to her, pressured her to have an
abortion, and then left her when she miscarried after giving her nothing
more than an STD, I wasn't upset. It was the explosive mother phone call
that upset me, especially since I had no idea that any of this was
coming, I was utterly blindsided. She also sent letters outlining a
similar story to my employer, the organisers of the festival where we
met, and even to trashy current affairs TV shows. Fortunately most of
the people she contacted gave me the benefit of the doubt, not least
because they knew that we lived approximately 800kms apart and that my
easily traceable movements pretty well confirmed that we had only met
the once. Even so, deeply embarrassing and not a little scary.
So yeah... a very idle flirt session-cum-date with an apparently nice
normal person turned out to be pretty traumatic. Pretty much every time
we speak, my mum still asks me not to give any weirdos I chat up her
phone number. I blame the thigh high boots.
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