I've been happily coupled off for more than eight years now, but prior to meeting my wife, I'd been through nothing but one tale of woe after another. Five consecutive relationships lasting eight weeks or less. Four that ended on or around Valentine's Day. Girlfriends poached by best friends not once, but twice. The cardinal sin: hooking up with a roommate, then trying to make it work. Each little tragedy had its afterlife, some lingering through a blue season like an overstaying guest, others packed and gone just a few days later, but there was one in particular that haunted me--not after the fact, but before. Call it The Relationship That Wasn't There.

It wasn't love at first sight. K seemed like one of those mean, beautiful, rich girls, and I rued the prospect of spending nine hours at her side. I was 16, she was 17, and we were en route to a small town in Brittany for seven weeks of cultural immersion and college application enhancement courtesy of Indiana University. My first impression turned out to be characteristically off-target, though--or irrelevant--and by the time we were airborne, we'd cut broad swathes of common ground and shared affinities.

We liked the same music, except that she went much deeper into it and tossed off the name of one band after another that I pretended to know--lots of "Oh yeah" and "They're so great." When the meal came, I started in on my entrée, leaving the salad aside. "Oh, you eat European-style?" said K. I pretended to know what she meant. Later, she chewed me out for not waking her for the breakfast service, though she'd been sleeping so sweetly.

We paired off by consensus, then became the core of a clique with two or three other opportunity-killing members. Unlike most of the other 30 kids on the program, who lived in or near the dreary provincial port town, K and I lived far in the country in opposite directions from the school. Her host family was amazing, better than her real one. Mine wasn't. Evenings and weekends were wet-chicken-scented purgatory.

I'd had crushes on friends and befriended crushes, but I'd never before had the two so evenly balanced, each amplifying the other. We shared a sense of the absurd, laughing together at things no one else found funny--the earnestness of our fish-out-of-water Hoosier classmates, the stiff provincial pride of the Bretons, a local restaurant called Chez Dave that we often talked about going to, but somehow never did. Helpless at the fineness of her smile, I willed myself to be smarter, more clever, anything to bring it on. K fascinated me in every sense of the word, and the fact that we spent so much time together was even more mind-blowing than spending the summer in France in the first place.

On a field trip to Mont Saint Michel, our elbows deliciously bonking and grazing, I felt a piece of paper slipped into my pocket. I glanced over and caught a snuck smile, and spent the rest of the day in a nether dimension, finding it impossible to retrieve the note until we'd separated--wasn't that the protocol? I probably should have looked right away, even if it had been an actual note and not a discarded candy bar wrapper bearing only traces of residual chocolate.

Although we had no better friends in the program and sought each other in a crowd, there was always something tenuous about the situation, as if it were the result of a clerical error that might be corrected at any time--I'm sorry, you were meant to buddy up with the boy with the smelly feet or the simple one with the Adam's apple. Afraid of breaking the spell, I was unwilling to ask questions even in situations that cried out for clarification--a missed rendezvous, an unmade plan, a troubling gap in one of her stories. K alluded to an unseen motorbike-riding French guy, a friend of her wonderful host sister, and I died the death of a hundred obscure references.

It seemed both inevitable and patently impossible that we would get together. Impossible won, but it was a hollow victory of missed opportunities, blown chances, and dumbstruck terror rather than the knockout blow of flat-out rejection. Down to the last precious minutes it still wasn't too late, and then it was. Our real parents collected us at O'Hare, and I went my separate way, dazed by the awful reality that nothing had happened.

K lived as far from Indianapolis as it's possible to get without leaving Indiana. I lost all the film I'd shot that summer and clung instead to a cramped group shot in which she was partially concealed and close-eyed. A woefully inadequate diet of long-distance calls was more than my parents were willing to pay for, and I began sneaking upstairs during parties at other people's houses to dial furtively in a dark bedroom, then hang up when an irritably awakened parent came on the line. K's brother lived in Indy, and I saw her on family trips to visit him, maybe, if she could swing it. I never made the trip to Evansville.

It was after we left for our respective colleges--hers in-state, mine out East--that I began my campaign of letters never sent. Nothing of any significance--just newsy, chatty, jokey kind of stuff, a page or two, complete and signed or abandoned mid-anecdote in recognition of the futility. There might have been a call or two freshman year, ill-timed, ill-advised, confusing. Then nothing.

Still, the inconclusiveness of our relationship kept it around somehow, an idle thought, a furtive wondering. The unexplored possibility offered an escape from whatever dismal moment I found myself in. Ditched for my roommate? Well, there's always K. Finally, a few days after graduation, my life in my hands, I bore down and actually mailed a letter to the last address I had for K, her parents' home in Evansville. It was light, yet mature, friendly, unembarrassed, the result of several days' work.

Three months passed. Paralyzed with fear of the real world, I decided to spend the fall in Madrid with two college buddies. The night before we left, K called. Her parents had only just forwarded my letter. We could have seen each other even last week, even this very night, if only we'd known. We talked for a while--her voice exactly as I'd remembered it--then I was off to Spain. The fall in Madrid blurred into winter, spring and summer, and then I was back in Indy.

I met K on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago, not far from where she now lived. She was a few minutes late and scared me with several worse case not-hers before she herself emerged from the after-work flow. I had buried my cat Tío that morning. I'd brought him back from Spain with me, a gift from an unfortunate Spanish girlfriend. Impossible to deal with at first, he was ultimately the sweetest, smartest Siamese ever, right until the night he finally got to explore the outdoors. It was great to open with; Tío would have wanted me to use it.

K and I had a few happy hour drinks, then somehow ended up talking about Nabokov in a hotel elevator bank before parting, no need to rush things after all this time. I saw a shooting star that night--no kidding.

It went unimaginably well. Given the logistics, it took a few months to get up to speed, but by Thanksgiving, I'd kissed her on the futon on the floor of my old room, my parents downstairs making dinner. It was the fall we hadn't had six years earlier.

Because of the mythic aspect of our romance, though, it was also completely pre-determined, happening for its own sake rather than emerging naturally. We assumed that we were in love--it sure felt that way. She was willing to accept my fable of long lost soul mates, and I was willing to forget that she hadn't shared it all along. But there was no context; the annoying fact remained that we didn't know each other as well as the script called for. Once again, I found myself feigning familiarity, never asking questions, never seeking clarification, just like old times.

The unreal aspect of our relationship was intensified by the three hours and 20 minutes between us. Because we lived at opposite ends of I-65, we only spent Special Time together--a weekend every few weeks--and never did weave that all-important fabric of shared daily experience. I never got to know her friends, and she rarely saw mine. You can only make so many phone calls between seeing each other--without new material, it starts to feel like talking dirty to grandma.

Always eccentric, K's musical tastes had evolved far beyond my scope of reference-- bands that even MTV didn't play, much less Midwestern FM radio. Though I'd held REM close since she first mentioned "Murmurs" so long ago, it turned out she dropped them not long after for becoming too commercial. I tried to catch up, playing CDs from her shelf at random while I stared at her books and photographs in hopes of learning who she might be now, or who she'd ever been. The lead-up to the first Gulf War brought to the surface views that I hadn't expected. I felt guilty about not liking her hats.

Though we talked easily and at length, K still had a way of skipping over important details. This, combined with my unwillingness to admit that I hadn't followed, led inevitably to little misunderstandings and missteps that accumulated as the fall turned to winter. When things went wrong, we had no way to deal with it and would spend hours under an ill-defined cloud of bad feeling--is she mad at me? Did I miss something? Does she think I'm mad at her? And yet, this was it, my dream come true. How could it be anything but perfect?

Notwithstanding my detours through Madrid and Naptown, my intention all along had been to move to San Francisco. Many of my college friends were already there; it was the Next Thing. K had a similar orientation toward Portland. We debated the cities without ever giving a clue whether we would go to either place together. It was implicit, or it wasn't; either way, it was absurd. K had never been part of the life that took me from Indianapolis to Cambridge to Madrid and next to San Francisco, just as our time together now had nothing to do with my life outside the walls of her apartment. They were two different worlds that seemed imaginary to each other.

The San Francisco scheme continued to develop until concrete timing emerged: June, shortly after the end of classes at the high school where I'd been tutoring. Two years delayed, I'd finally rejoin my old college crowd and pick up where we left off senior year, beautiful young things poised to take over the world.

My excitement was such that I announced my plans to K, never realizing that in so doing, I would finally breach the wall between the two worlds and reveal which one was real, and which a dream always fated to end. K, more attuned to hidden messages, recognized this right away, and saw which side she was on. I tried to repair the damage--urged her to come out with me, as if I'd said "we" and not "I" all along, but it was too late. By making the decision as if our relationship hadn't existed, I'd showed that it never really had.

Appropriately, we never actually broke up. Before we managed to schedule another visit, K went with her family to Florida for the middle two weeks of February. I had no number for her there, so any communication would have to come from her end. Valentine's Day came and went in silent affirmation of the obvious. A month later, while listening to REM's new "Out of Time," I wrote a letter that I finally would send: matter-of-fact, blameless, sad, sorry it hadn't gone differently.

And that was that. The end a seven-year relationship that never quite managed to happen. I moved out to San Francisco, found that dream to have been based on little more reality than its adversary, spun through a few more failed relationships.

Then I met the woman who would be my wife and the mother of my child, and we lived happily ever after.