Love Story: Waiting for Women 2% of My Life

• Posted on 20th June 2016
• in celebrity books, divorce & remarriage, Entertainment, entertainment books, Hollywood memoirs, Love Story
• by Ben

---

Part of this little

love story

about waiting for the many ladies throughout my life appears in the author’s preface to the appropriately titled third volume of my memoirs: Waiting for Elizabeth. I have revised the numbers in paragraph three to reflect time passed since I wrote the preface.

“The wedding tradition of the groom standing at the front of the church waiting for the bride is no accident. It’s basic training for marriage. … I want to talk a bit about waiting for women. I’m confident that all heterosexual men will resonate with what I have to say.

“One evening in 2003 or 2004 Elizabeth (often abbreviated as EH) was meeting me at a subway stop downtown to go see a show. I got there five or ten minutes before the appointed time and stood on the sidewalk having a smoke and watching the people. EH arrived a few minutes later and while I was waiting I got to thinking about the act of waiting for her. We’d been together by then for thirty-six or seven years and, while punctual to a fault when it came to gigs, in some situations she could be a tad (to use one of her contextually-defined words) ‘wifty’ about time. It seemed always to take her longer than anticipated to complete her final preparations when we were going somewhere together so I spent a fair amount of time at our front door inquiring, ‘Should I push the elevator button?’ Not only that but once we got where we were going and it was time to leave I dubbed her the ‘Goodbye Girl’ because while I’d go to the door, wave my hand and say, ‘Goodnight everybody!’, she would have a short conversation with almost everyone in the place as though she were going to Patagonia the next day.

“Anyhow in my mind I began to guesstimate how many hours a week I spent waiting for my beloved. It’s been about twelve years since I did this little exercise and it was done in my not-very-mathematical head so don’t expect a lot of accuracy but it was an amazing amount of time over nearly forty nine years. Figure (wild guess encompassing nearly five decades) two hours an average week which is 104 hours a year times 49 years is almost 30 weeks!  And you know what? It was worth it. When I add my mom and the myriad girlfriends before I met Elizabeth to the waiting list, fuhgeddaboudit!”

To elaborate a bit on that excerpt, the expanded waiting goes all the way back to my high school days when I began to go out with girls. I do not recall ever picking up a young lady for a date without waiting at least ten minutes. I’m talking 1950-’51 here folks, a long time ago. When I contemplate my profligate and active youth and begin to mentally enumerate, the waiting time begins to snowball. Figuring an average of a date a week from 1951 through 1967 (when that segment of my life came happily to a close) we’re talking about 832 events involving waiting for the opposite gender. With a conservative ten minute average that would give us 139 hours or about six days. Now we calculate how much time I spent waiting for my Mom over 29 years (after which I moved to NYC) which would have to be, at minimum, twice that per year and round it up we have about six weeks. There’s no way to accurately estimate waiting time for all the other females in my long life but reasonably it would surely equal the mom weeks so that’s another six for a total of thirteen weeks. Jumping back to the previous paragraph and grabbing EH’s weeks the total ads up to 43 weeks. Then adding in the myriad other ladies with whom I have interacted I’ll round this off to 78 weeks; a year and a half.

I have spent approximately two percent of my life waiting for women. To reiterate: (mostly) it was worth it.

Click here to get Waiting for Elizabeth

Tags: Elizabeth Hepburn