Rhythm Method


I am not sure when I first heard of biorhythms. Certainly I was a teenager then, maybe as young as 12. You read about a lot of things at that age and don’t know whether to believe them or not. I’m still not sure about biorhythms.

The idea is that everyone has a physical cycle that is 23 days long, an emotional one that lasts 28 days, and a mental one that goes for 33 days, all starting on the day you are born. This was less complicated and easier to accept than, say, astrology. It might be wrong, but you almost have to believe that there are cycles in people’s lives. As a woman, I can tell you there damn well is one in mine, though it’s not tied to the day I was born. But the idea appealed to me, and I did a lot of arithmetic to see where I was, and when the high and low days were. Then I’d usually forget about it. But sometime later I would start thinking about it again, and drag out my figures or do them over. I must have done that a half-dozen times.

As I got older, I started collecting the birthdays of boys I dated (and, later, men). Somebody 33 days older or younger than you has the same mental cycle, as does someone 66, 99, and so forth days away from you. And of course the same goes for the emotional and physical cycles. The closer the better, in theory. A perfect match, though, has to be the same date of birth or 55 years away, so you don’t expect perfection. You probably couldn’t stand it anyway.

I hung up charts with the long triple curves at the times when the interest came back, and planned trips around them to some extent, and was careful on certain days. That last part didn’t hurt, anyway.

People knew me for talking about the rhythms, and asking a man for his birthdate serves as well for a conversation starter as asking what sign he is. Maybe better, since he won’t fudge by a year or two if he understands that there might be an advantage in not doing so.

I met Ken Riley at a wedding. I worked with the bride, and he was a friend of the groom. We talked to each other some, but nothing happened. The married couple gave a party a couple of months later, and this time Ken and I made a date, and that led to another one.

I had been living on my own for two years then. In that time I had a long affair with a man which ended badly, and two more that didn’t work out but weren’t really unhappy (though one was pretty stupid.) In all three cases the patterns were way off, but I had never taken the biorhythms seriously enough, steadily enough, to look before it didn’t matter. Though I had the information. It might not have mattered; my friends had already been telling me that the one man was really wrong for me.

By the fifth time I went out with Ken, I wasn’t really starting to think about getting physical with him, but I was thinking about thinking about it — if that makes sense.