I recently found myself in a relationship with a co-worker, a prep school golfer from Greenwhich Connecticut who was my friend and much to my surprise became my boyfriend. On the surface we didn’t have much in common, and I thought him to be a nerd, (his name was Frans, what else was I supposed to think?), but somehow he snuck in under my carefully-tuned anti-relationship radar. I knew I was in trouble when, months into our friendship, we were entertaining a client, an older James Taylor lookalike who was a family friend of Frans’s. As the night wore on and James drunkenly flirted with me, Frans in a fit of jealousy ran out of the bar, leaving behind his credit card and a slightly awkward situation for the client and I (which we soon alleviated with more alcohol.) A few weeks later I was Frans’s invited guest on a birthday dinner with his parents in the city. From the moment I arrived and read the glow of anticipation on his parents’ Dutch faces and acknowledged their “I’ve heard so much about you” with an “I’ve heard so much about you too,” I realized I had been hijacked. Hijacked into a double date with Frans’s parents, and ultimately a relationship with someone I never would have considered had times been a little different.

The year was 2000, and we worked at the internet advertising behemoth DoubleClick. I truly believed along with my coworkers that we were changing the world and keeping the internet free. It was a time when baby-faced CEOs graced the cover of The Industry Standard and Kozmo and Urban Fetch were only a keystroke away. If Urban Fetch delivered CDs and DVDs to your door, below cost, with a free batch of chocolate chip cookies to boot, then why couldn’t a relationship between Frans and I be possible? With the myriad of DoubleClick couples sprouting up as quickly as the free soda machines were replenished (assistants pairing up with salespeople, traffickers with graphic designers, PR reps with publishers), the idea of the Connecticut golf boy pairing up with the Peoria rocker chick didn’t seem implausible. In fact it began to feel normal.

Frans was my IM confidante, my lunch buddy, the kid who I could take along on every industry happy hour and DoubleClick terrace party. The jobs we were so devoted to demanded ten to twelve hour days out of the two of us, and those days bled into happy hours which bled into late night pool matches and an occasional smooch as we parted ways at 1 or 2 am. The pool table, just like the office, was our common ground. Even though Frans had learned the game growing up in his Connecticut manse and I had learned it at 26 in the spit and sawdust bars of the East Village, we were worthy opponents, and even better partners. Everyone in the office thought we were sleeping together, and eventually we were. (I remember justifying the leap from workmates to bedmates by musing, “Well, if everyone thinks we are sleeping together even though we aren’t, why shouldn’t we, if they’re going to think that anyway?” Of course he agreed.)

Frans and I looked a bit mismatched to say the least. At those happy hours of days past I would often arrive donned in a combination of my favorite accoutrements of the time – night glasses, cowboy hat, fluffy-cuffed coat, and 3 inch platform boots – while Frans could be counted on for wearing any number of Polo dress shirts purchased via the loving credit card of his mother, and one of the dozen khakis he rotated into his daily wardrobe. Once we were a couple, however, I was able to take more liberties with Frans than I had when he was my friend. Suddenly I had a vested interest in him cutting his ski-sloped coif and ditching the khakis for black flat front pants (something I was never able to accomplish, but he did concede to buying some slate colored pleated pants. Compromise is the key to many a relationship, and I took what I could get.)

As if part of an unconscious social experiment, my friends and I went so far as to develop an alter ego of sorts to make Frans a little more… ghettorific. We used Halloween as an opportunity to dress him up like the men we’re used to hanging out with-- spiking his hair, donning him in a retro shirt and thrift store leather jacket, and christening him Fransi for the night. The nickname stuck, and so did the attitude. Soon Fransi was in tow everywhere my friends and I went, like a foreign exchange student we were entertaining (and being entertained by) for the school year. (Funnily enough, when I emailed Jayme, my philosophy grad student friend the photos of Halloween, she replied, “Tell me what Frans is supposed to be again. It doesn’t look to me like he’s in a costume.” A month later when she met him for the first time, she understood.)

My friends and I took Fransi with us to biker bars, fed him pills, and used his Upper West Side apartment filled with inherited Connecticut furniture as a den of iniquities. One night at Red Rock West he got so caught up in the raucousness that he joined the dancing girls on the bar during the song “Cult of Personality” . As the lyrics “I exploit you, still you love me,” blared from the juke, a burly Harley bouncer grabbed Fransi by the scruff of his shirt and whisked him from the bar. I leapt off in his defense, pleading with the bouncer’s hovering fist that Frans didn’t know any better (he claims the Wall Street types herded at the bar “pushed” him up there anyway.) The bouncer was finally swayed from resorting to violence, and we avoided the place for a while.

Clearly there were times when Fransi would slip, and to our disappointment we would realize we were out with Frans. (“Can Fransi come out and play?”, my friend Jen and I would ask whenever Frans was complaining of a stomach ache or just being a general dud. ) In one of these moments, we were singing along to the radio on the way to yet another DoubleClick sponsored drinkathon, when Frans bursted out, “Dude looks like a monkey!” (I don’t even think Aerosmith was on the radio at the time. Or, of course, a song about monkeys.) On one ecstasy-dappled evening he accepted a ride on my friend Meeker’s motorcycle, and in a Frans-induced safety precaution, he wrapped his head in a t-shirt and clutched Meeker’s back while they did wheelies down 9th Avenue. This we learned from Meeker’s report at 2 pm the following day, when Fransi had not yet surfaced from the night before, apparently passed out in a crumpled Polo shirt and wrinkled khakis in his Upper West Side bed. There were also occasions when Frans used words like “indeedy” and danced like an animal caught in an electric fence. As he would approach us jerking from the stiff spasms of his unique breed of dance, we would adjourn from the dance floor for a spell (I even attempted dance lessons on a number of occasions, but they didn’t seem to take.)

Some of Frans’s nerdisms might be attributed to the innocuousness of the pop music prep boy lifestyle he experienced up until 2000 when he moved to Manhattan. But I soon learned that even back home in Greenwich, Frans was the guy to get totally ripped on, and usually by his friends. They were constantly snickering at his golf game and Dutch name, but his attitude was so good I found him to be sweet, at least until another flagrant nerdism would rear its head. Every day was an opportunity for a vocabulary lesson, as I soon learned that words like “kitsch” and “cunnilingus” apparently didn’t make it north of the state line. (The latter took a lot of convincing on my part—not the act itself, but the term.) We had our romantic moments, but often times they were punctuated with a special blend of uncouth that could only come from Frans. For Valentine’s Day he took me to a kosher restaurant he had chosen from a program in his Palm Pilot (the power tool of the nerding class). This in and of itself is not a big deal, but the fact that Frans thought that “kosher” literally meant “cool” (and that clearly neither one of us is Jewish) was cause to raise the geek flag.

This is not to say that I am not a bit of a nerd myself. I watch Animal Planet, like Led Zeppelin and crossword puzzles, can sing all the words to Foreigner’s Greatest hits, and develop unrealistic crushes on rock stars. Some of those things are nerdy, and some of them are simply a result of growing up in Peoria, a town where the lives of many were sustained on blue collar angst and rock and roll. The differences between Frans and I were not just a matter of nerd vs. cool, however, at least not superficially. There’s a deeper side of cool, something that permeates the way people think and view the world, that goes far beyond the music they listen to or the activities they engage in. The deeper side of cool is believing in equal rights for all genders and creeds (and species, in the case of the Animal Planet show hosts), an attitude that some of the country clubbers seem to have been slow to adopt. My assertions to Frans that the women and minorities at DoubleClick weren’t allowed the same power and prestige as their male and white counterparts never catalyzed the type of conversations I’d have about the same issues with my friends. We managed to sway Frans from voting for George W (or so he told us), but did we really change the way he thought? I am afraid we did not, as his recent statement that my clients’ Indian-American targeted ad campaign was aimed at the “Taliban” and his assertion that the thieves that recently stole his wallet in the Catskills were looking to get their next “fix” seem to prove.

Soon I realized that the superficial differences between us were a reflection of something much more fundamental than skiing vs. snowboarding or public school vs. prep school. Eventually the common ground we coexisted on during the height of the internet age fell apart just as did the internet economy around us. Our respected friends and co-workers lost their jobs, and we as survivors found ourselves shuffled into positions we never wanted, yet we were supposed to be grateful for having gainful employment at all. The DoubleClick couples disbanded, the happy hours ended, and most of our friends were no longer working next to us but instead collecting unemployment and contacting us via their hotmail accounts. The fantasy died, professionally and personally, for us all.

It was not for naught, however, as Frans and I surely gained from our time together. I learned how to hit a golf ball and he went to a Marilyn Manson concert. He introduced me to Amsterdam and Nantucket; I introduced him to Brooklyn and East Peoria. Through one another we got to see how the other half lived – an experience that I’m sure was at the same time enlightening and frightening to us both. But ultimately I learned that it takes more than clothes to open someone’s mind – you can take the boy out of the khakis but you can’t take the khakis out of the boy, if you know what I mean. Fransi had been an invention not just of me but of Frans, an external persona that did not reflect what was happening inside. As we stumbled around the reasons why we eventually ended the relationship, we kept returning to the same basic point. “We’re just too different,” Frans said, in the next breath calling me a philosopher, a comment which Jayme found amusingly dire. “Oh great, so he thinks you’re shackled to a life of slinging coffee and paying for your cigarettes with couch change,” she said. But actually I was flattered, and comfortable with being on the deeper side of our relationship fence. As fun as it had been to hang out with Fransi, creating a new person isn’t nearly as fun as learning from someone who is already the person they want to be. A philosopher searches for the truth, which is challenging to find in the alter egos we give ourselves as we struggle to discover who we really are. Perhaps in that vein, Fransi helped Frans in more ways than I ever could have.

Months have passed and Frans and I have both moved on – at least from the personal side of our relationship, as we still maintain the professional side. We sit one desk away from each and are infused with one another’s presence – our smells (his pungent cologne bath) and sounds (my sales-frenzied phone calls) on a daily basis. But long gone are the days when I would become melancholy while driving by a golf course or hearing a Phish song on the radio (thankfully, neither situation occurred very often, and I was soon over it.) There are no great sentimental losses on Frans’s end either. He has a new position at work, a new confidence, and even a new girlfriend, a smiley faced DoubleClick girl with whom we once shared a cab. I don’t know whether or not this is a real relationship, or yet another “hijacking” (perhaps he considers that cab ride their first date?). I do know that they’ll have a much better chance at happiness if their inner selves get along, be those inner selves nerds or hipsters or something in between. I hold one hope for them and their moments spent together– that in the harsh reality of life in 2002, they can still have a bit of 2000-type fun.