Diary,
There’s a joke about a woman who was in bed with her husband. In the middle of the night, she had a nightmare in which someone was knocking at the door. She awoke and vigorously shook her husband.
“Quick!” she said. “My husband is home.”
Her husband woke up fast, gathered up his clothes and was halfway out of the window when he paused.
“Wait a doggone minute. This is my house.” Red to the gills, he confronted his wife. “Who have you been bringing to our bed when I’m not here?”
After a few seconds of dread and deep contemplation, she said, “If you knew that, where were you going? Which other woman’s bed have you been sleeping in when you are not home?”
In the same vein, there’s an adage that makes the rounds around virile men… “You never step foot into a house whose rent you don’t pay.”
It makes for good advice, since some poor sods have had to fight their way into dwellings whose rent they do pay. These daughters of Eve can be a conniving lot when left to their own devices.
What’s my point? Oh, yeah. My point is, failure to heed some warnings — even those from men who can’t keep it in their pants — can be outright embarrassing, if not downright life-threatening. In my case, I had to be rescued by good-natured strangers as I dangled naked on a make-shift rope two stories above the ground.
You see, I’ve dated women suffering all kinds of phobias—arachnophobia (spiders), aviophobia (planes), acrophobia (heights) and of course, good old claustrophobia (enclosed spaces). Never had I met a woman claiming agoraphobia, which she explained as “anxiety for being away from my usual environment. I don’t feel safe”.
To that effect, even in our brief meeting at the restaurant, she exhibited symptoms such as breathlessness, sweating, dizziness, fast heart rate, nausea, you name it. As a medical doctor, I could tell she wasn’t faking it, and seeing as I did want to see our date to the end, we ended up at her flat.
Everything went fine until the very middle of the night, when there came a knock on the door. She awoke and vigorously shook me. “Quick!” she said. “My husband is home!”
I gawped. “Your husband?”
“He wasn’t supposed to be home for another two days.”
“Why didn’t you mention you were married? You could’ve saved us both a lot of—”
“Will you stand there bickering, or will you take this rope and rappel out of the window?”
As I climbed down the third-floor window, wondering why she had the rope fashioned out of bedsheets handy — “How often does this happen?” — I realised the rope wouldn’t take me all the way to the ground.
Looking out of the window, she saw my dilemma.
“Oops!” she said. “My bad. Our previous flat was on the first floor.”
