The Catch and Release Woman

When I was 18 I met an older woman who was utterly remarkable in every way, beautiful, sophisticated, loving, talented. She had but one flaw. She baited the men of other women.  She was not interested in any of the single successful handsome and rich men who wanted her. Like other single women with children she’d have a dozen excuses for why she didn’t date.  Some indeed were truly valid. Society is so constraining  on mothers, especially the truly gifted and intelligent.

But when her girl friends or other women brought their husbands and boyfriends over she’d go into erotic hyperdrive enticing the men, or « baiting them « as one young man once observed. Then when she was sure they were all but trussed up and hung in the window she’d turn them down. 

She had demonstrated that she could have the men but didn’t take them, she retuned them slightly used emotionally, not physically,  to their partners. They didn’t much  appreciate the handling of their men. She did create a false impression, always feigning innocence. She was unsettling to  the always dubious harmony of long standing relationships and community.

I coined the term ‘catch and release’ woman because she didn’t like fish. She just liked knowing she could put the hook in the cheek, extract it and throw the fish back in the sea.  

No one knew what had happened to her when she was young .  Those who knew her then said she’d loved a married man who did not leave his wife for her though she’d believed he would. She believed she had more to offer than his wife and she would show him.   Ever since ,she’d repeated this emotional trauma proving she could,and unwilling to accept that she hadn’t.  She couldn’t even be angry at the man and might well still be waiting. 

  

She was sad for one so beautiful.  She appeared  doomed to love the memory of a  man she never really knew. But that’s just what some said. 

I only observed the behaviour and encountered it again and again in my work where dreams and myths were so often safer and more controllable than reality.. The adventure of living was no less because these ‘beautiful losers’ as Leonard Cohen described them lived where others merely existed. She was big on a broad screen and famous in her little world where she did  so much good. She was kind especially to children. She taught the young so much especially of a lost time of romance and love. When warriors really did ride on white horses and fighter planes flew over head. Before so many young men died never to be replaced. 

 She grew wise and even more beautiful with time. Everyone forgot her dancing on toes and hearts. Who cared really. It was all so far in the past. Just  to be touched by such glorious magnificence was such a thrill for the lonely.  

When I throw back a fish I sometimes  of her. The catch and release woman.