Years ago, when I was playing the part of Sister Sophia in The Sound of Music, I met a boy from Wales on Grafton Street.
He was an indie boy. Vaguely dirty. The kind you wouldn't take home to your mother. This Welsh rare bit had stringy, greasy black hair and dark, almost black eyes that seemed to look into my soul. He knew about bands I'd never heard of. Like one called the Manic Street Preachers. This was way before they were famous. He said he used to move their gear for them after gigs. He spoke with a foreign rhythm, which, combined with his homeless air, was an enticing novelty.
This boy came to see me in The Sound of Music. He stood in my school hall, sweating silently as he stood by the walls because all the seats were all taken. "You were a very good nun," he said, and we laughed because I knew he was lying through his mis-shapen teeth. We kissed. I don't remember it, but I suppose we must have. And then, when I moved to Birmingham, I must have given him my phone number. He called one day. Said he was going to take the National Express coach from Swansea or wherever. And then he was there, standing in my friend's mother's back room, and I suddenly realised that there was nothing between us. Nothing at all.
I call it the flinch factor. It's that moment when you know you can't go any further with a boy or girl, no matter what. He will accidentally brush past you on the bus heading into town, and you will suddenly realise that you don't want him to be anywhere near you. And it's terrible, because he is a nice boy, decent and kind, and you have been giving him all those signals, because that's what you do when someone fancies you, and you want it to work, because you don't know when the next one will come along - or if another one ever will. But what it takes is for him to reciprocate in a genuine way to show you that you don't feel anything. He tries to hold your hand, and you flinch, because this is your body's way of telling him it's just not going to happen.
And then, because he hasn't read the flinch properly, you have to tell him with words. Go back to Cardiff or Llandudno or wherever you came from on that National Express coach. And he'll look at you with dark mournful eyes and mutter something lyrical you don't understand, and you'll feel awful.
This lovely girl I know wouldn't mind a boyfriend, but she's not so desperate she can afford to ignore the flinch factor. On paper the guy she was seeing was everything she could want. But paper, schmaper, as she put it so eloquently. We went for a juice and ended up discussing her predicament. She wasn't flinching just yet, but nor was her heart on fire. What to do?
She persevered. The pressure was on from her friends. Maybe your feelings will develop, they said. He's so perfect for you, they said. I asked whether she might be sabotaging the thing before it had even started, in a subconsciously self-destructive way. She didn't think so. She just wasn't into him.
As well as being guilty of flinching behaviour in the past, I have been on the receiving end, and there is nothing worse. The flincher is, by meeting up with and sometimes even kissing you, implying that they want the relationship to go somewhere. But deep down you know by their body language that they wish they were somewhere else, probably on the other side of the world. But this knowledge isn't good enough. You need it spelled out. That's the part where they turn their head when you go to kiss them, and that's the moment you know you've been well and truly flinched.
My friend continued going out with this man, hoping she might wake up one day and fancy him, but then one night the inevitable happened. He touched her, and she flinched. She knew it was the end. You can't go from flinching to fancying; it's a biological impossibility. Flinching can only turn to hatred and resentment. She didn't want that to happen. She wanted - she hated saying it - to be just friends.
When she confided that she had finished the thing before it had really begun, a close relative of hers was upset. You could have made yourself like him. You mustn't have tried hard enough. Oh, when are you going to fall in love, she implored, as though falling in love must happen to everyone at some stage, an inevitability of life, just like death. But there are people, my friend thinks to herself, who find themselves flinching around the person they are married to. And she knows she would rather be living in a bedsit with 27 cats than endure that kind of torture.
roisiningle@irish-times.ie