Women, for nearly 30 years, Dennis Janson was the man your mother warned you about. Smart, attractive, charming, fun. He was engaged: To life, excitement, late nights and good conversation. But never to you.

        DJ looked at commitment like it was smallpox. Contagious, dangerous and lamentable.

        “It's not that I was a lout, I just couldn't commit,” he says.

        Mr. Janson night-crawled nightly. Main Street, Hyde Park, after-hours in Covington. When everyone else went home, DJ's elbow was still on the bar. One more. See you tomorrow night.

        Only at some point, life runs out of tomorrow nights and the bottom of the glass is just that. So, you stop being fodder for women who stereotype men as pleasure-seeking commitment-phobes. You realize contentment is a subtle, more mature, form of pleasure.

        It's amazing what you can see when you wipe 3 a.m. from your eyes.

        Mr. Janson, who is 51 years old, will get married in three weeks, for the first time. One of our town's foremost bon vivants — also the best nightly sports anchor I've seen, here or anywhere — stopped running nearly five years ago. He has discovered a good walk is just as fulfilling.

        “I like holding hands,” he says.

        I had some things to ask Mr. Janson. I had some things I wanted to know. Is he wiser for having waited? Does he regret the time lost? Bar-hopping nearly every night for 30 years: Is that a record?

        “There has been a general level of amazement and shock that I'm getting married,” he says. “Honestly, I don't know how people do this (marriage) at a younger age. I really don't.”

        The answer is, not always very well. People who marry at 18 are often done by 21. People who marry at 21 are done by 30.

        It takes a lifetime to know and love yourself; some never manage it. If you don't love yourself, how can you love someone else?

        At 51, DJ has taken a lot of the luck out of the marriage equation. That's what marriage is when you're young: A chance, a spin of the wheel, an impulse you hope will stick.

        He and his bride-to-be met with the minister recently. “How do you want to be remembered?” Mr. Janson was asked.

        “As someone who was given a second chance,” DJ said. “Someone whose life started at 51 and he made the most of it.”

        He waited because he was always looking for something better. “I was a people pleaser,” he says. “With me it was always maybe, probably, we'll see. All these catch-phrases you lapse into when you don't want to make a commitment. It was never yes or no, because I didn't want to disappoint people.”

        There was no maybe this time. He met Sara some 20 years ago. They dated. DJ, being DJ, eventually got the caged-bird feeling, and flew away. Their paths kept crossing, but he was never ready to abandon the late lights. Until now.

        “My last flirtation with a maybe,” Mr. Janson calls it.

        He said to Sara, “Let's put an end to the qualifiers. Let's get married.” He announced it on the air, with typical Janson candor and eloquence: “I've come to my senses. Sara has lost hers.”

        He has no magic formula for marital success. DJ doesn't claim to have all the answers. He only hopes he has his.

        “For 30 years, I confused happiness with exhilaration and excitement. Happiness can be very quiet,” Mr. Janson says. “I wish I could have gotten to this point years ago, but I don't regret waiting until I felt right.”

        That's what it comes down to, then. Even at age 51, after 30 years of closing times, future-less relationships and maybes. Feeling right.

        Dennis Janson won't be having a bachelor party. It would seem redundant.

       Contact Paul Daugherty by phone: 768-8454; fax: 768-8330; e-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com.

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