I think we've had our first misunderstanding. I'll try to put my issues on the table and, if you're interested, you can respond.

I thought we had a great time Saturday. We communicated on a very high plane for much longer than I had anticipated, and we seemed to enjoy one another's company. So I was very surprised when, in my follow-up phone call a few days later, you seemed to me to be curt, dismissive and even angry.

I know that having intellectual conversations does not in itself prepare people for dealing with failed communications and other kinds of disconnects, so I have to assume that there's something I'm just not getting here. Let me toss out a few observations and see if any of them stimulate you to want to clarify whatever it is I've misunderstood.

1) The older I get the more easy it is for me to take delight in people. They seem more like my children and less like my oppressors, and I find more in them to love than to hate. This has been a very unexpected and pleasant development for me to experience in my fifties. Yet I have already noticed that sometimes the happiness it causes me to feel in the presence of younger people causes them a bit of anxiety. Frankly, I'm on the side of love and if people want to feel anxious in its presence that's their problem. But when it's with a person I hope to have an ongoing relationship with, I naturally want to work on reducing their anxiety if it's based on inappropriate assumptions — as it usually is.

2) My general impression of you was that you're one of the most intellegent women I've ever met, that you're very beautiful physically (not in a Barbie Doll way but in your very own memorable way), and that it sounded as if very few men had ever had the guts to make you aware of that. I can't understand why you haven't had more suitors worthy of you in the last 15 years. Although nothing you actually said confirmed this, your emotional tone seemed one of long-standing disappointment with men and resignation concerning having a romantic relationship. I know this last observation may touch a nerve and you may see this all very differently — but that's what I felt at our first meeting.

3) Looking back on Tuesday evening's phone call, one possible interpretation for your dismissive tone is that you may have felt I was just another horny guy eager to get laid and that you're sick to death of this type. You may have felt that you might as well cut me off at the knees before my enthusiasm got any more annoying. I was indeed taken aback by your curtness, but you need to understand that the intellectual content of what you actually said was quite appealing to me.

4) One of the things that I learned from my years in the gay community — aware as I always was of the ambiguity of my committment to it — was that gay men really like one another. They get together for the flimsiest excuse and, although some of them are quite promiscuous, enjoy one another's company tremendously even when sex is not on the menu. When you look at straight life from this context the first thing you notice is that heterosexuals don't seem ever to become friends. Straight men and women either sleep together or keep each other at arm's length. Even being friends with the spouse of a friend is expected to be quite formal and conducted merely for the well-being of the primary friendship. This is one of the hypocrisies of heterosexism I find most despicable: that men consider women interesting only if they're sexually available, and vice versa.

5) As difficult as it is for heterosexuals, with their strict cultural training and beloved taboos, to be friends with the opposite sex, as a born-again breeder I find I personally prefer friendship to romance — and for precisely the reason that it breaks the taboo and the stereotype. I have always been attracted to challenges, and find I always learn more from entering uncharted territory than when falling into the same groove that everyone else is coasting along in.

Ellen, I know that one of the things that disturbed you most about your first lover was his emotional clinginess, his authoritarian decision that his need for you could not be questioned, an obsessiveness that literally wiped out your identity. I have no interest in undermining anyone's identity. If you don't want us to be friends I'll never bother you again. But I really think there's a good chance that you misinterpreted my enthusiasm on Saturday. I'm a very open person. I love my life and all the beautiful people and events I experience. But that doesn't mean I have rigid expectations. Quite the contrary. Because I am so happy with the life I've built for myself, I can be quite flexible. I'm willing to accomodate lots of people with idiosyncratic notions of what they need from me. How else can you love people unless you love who they uniquely are and give to them what they uniquely need?

Yes, of course I'm open to "just being friends" with you. Are you open to just being friends with me?