After saving me from the minor indignity of having to hustle to fill my own dance card, I was ebullient with "Perfect Timing." We bantered back and forth while we danced for a couple of songs, then he asked me for my phone number. It was the kind of "meet cute" scene you would see in a Jennifer Aniston movie. And there, dear readers, is your foreshadowing. Has Jennifer Aniston ever been in a movie that *doesn't* tease you with its promise, but then turns out to be the same craptastic, soul-sucking movie on which she has built her career?
Perfect Timing was the first guy I went out with after my marriage broke up. Intimidatingly smart, he was a 51-year-old former sitcom writer currently employed as a website consultant. At first things seemed fun and very promising. He was that combination of intelligent and funny that I find devastating, my romantic kryptonite. But after the first few dates, Perfect Timing either lost interest in romancing me or he got lazy. We didn't go out a lot. We stayed in at my place. We spent a lot of time talking and laughing. Usually in bed. Sometimes I would make him dinner. Sometimes we would go out for dinner, but only as an impromptu event prompted by *his* appetite. And we never went swing dancing.
While I liked having regular sex with a guy who could make me think and laugh, I didn't like the way he closed himself off from me emotionally. Sometimes it felt like he had decided from the beginning that there was no way he was going to let himself get emotionally involved with me because I didn't fit his criteria of qualities in a girlfriend. It reminded me of a professor I had in college who seemed to decide within the first week of your first class with him whether you were an A, B or C student. And no matter how much effort you put into your term papers or class participation, he still gave you the grade he had given you in his head during that first week in his first class.
I wondered if he was in love with his best friend -- a beautiful woman from India who had a Ph.D in physics. I don't have a Ph.D in anything, let alone physics. Maybe that's why it felt like he had pegged me as a "C"-- someone fun to hang out with in bed, but not someone worth romancing, not a girlfriend. I felt taken for granted. When I could no longer tolerate it and told him I didn't want to continue to see him because I wanted a boyfriend, not a regular hookup, he acted surprised by my characterization of our relationship. But because I am a Ph.D-less idiot who still goes to Jennifer Aniston movies even though they're always bad, I agreed to go out with him again a couple of weeks later. I guess I missed him in a perverse Stockholm syndrome way.
This time around though, I stopped looking for the flaws in myself that would explain why our relationship sucked and started noticing his. One night he told me about a problem he had observed in many of his previous relationships with women. He felt he had just stuck around "hoping for a few emotional crumbs" from them. Of course, he seemed oblivious to the fact that in order to get more than just "a few emotional crumbs," you have to give more than just crumbs.
On what turned out to be our last date, I noticed and was annoyed by how conversationally "stingy" he was while we were having dinner at a restaurant I had chosen, not one of his. Even though I tried hard to make him laugh and think, he wasn't in the mood to be entertained by me. When we ended up back at my place in bed (as always), I was shocked when he offhandedly asked me where I had grown up, and not the name of my small hometown, but the state. I was struck by the casual way he asked this very basic personal question, as if he were asking for a detail too small and insignificant to remember--something like where had my mother grown up or where had my brother gone to college. A guy I had been seeing almost every week for six months couldn't be bothered to remember the state where I had been born and raised. WTF?! And that's the humiliating straw that broke the camel's back and made me decide I would never go out with him again.
It was also the humiliating experience that made me significantly raise the bar of what I expect in a boyfriend. It made me decide that it's not nearly enough to ask for a guy who is funny, smart and superficially nice to me. I want to date the kind of smart, funny, nice guy who *also* thinks I am worth the effort and emotional risk of romance. And by the end of the first date, he'd better f*cking know the state where I grew up. I would rather hold out for a feast than settle for crumbs again. I hope I don't starve.
While I liked having regular sex with a guy who could make me think and laugh, I didn't like the way he closed himself off from me emotionally. Sometimes it felt like he had decided from the beginning that there was no way he was going to let himself get emotionally involved with me because I didn't fit his criteria of qualities in a girlfriend. It reminded me of a professor I had in college who seemed to decide within the first week of your first class with him whether you were an A, B or C student. And no matter how much effort you put into your term papers or class participation, he still gave you the grade he had given you in his head during that first week in his first class.
I wondered if he was in love with his best friend -- a beautiful woman from India who had a Ph.D in physics. I don't have a Ph.D in anything, let alone physics. Maybe that's why it felt like he had pegged me as a "C"-- someone fun to hang out with in bed, but not someone worth romancing, not a girlfriend. I felt taken for granted. When I could no longer tolerate it and told him I didn't want to continue to see him because I wanted a boyfriend, not a regular hookup, he acted surprised by my characterization of our relationship. But because I am a Ph.D-less idiot who still goes to Jennifer Aniston movies even though they're always bad, I agreed to go out with him again a couple of weeks later. I guess I missed him in a perverse Stockholm syndrome way.
This time around though, I stopped looking for the flaws in myself that would explain why our relationship sucked and started noticing his. One night he told me about a problem he had observed in many of his previous relationships with women. He felt he had just stuck around "hoping for a few emotional crumbs" from them. Of course, he seemed oblivious to the fact that in order to get more than just "a few emotional crumbs," you have to give more than just crumbs.
On what turned out to be our last date, I noticed and was annoyed by how conversationally "stingy" he was while we were having dinner at a restaurant I had chosen, not one of his. Even though I tried hard to make him laugh and think, he wasn't in the mood to be entertained by me. When we ended up back at my place in bed (as always), I was shocked when he offhandedly asked me where I had grown up, and not the name of my small hometown, but the state. I was struck by the casual way he asked this very basic personal question, as if he were asking for a detail too small and insignificant to remember--something like where had my mother grown up or where had my brother gone to college. A guy I had been seeing almost every week for six months couldn't be bothered to remember the state where I had been born and raised. WTF?! And that's the humiliating straw that broke the camel's back and made me decide I would never go out with him again.
It was also the humiliating experience that made me significantly raise the bar of what I expect in a boyfriend. It made me decide that it's not nearly enough to ask for a guy who is funny, smart and superficially nice to me. I want to date the kind of smart, funny, nice guy who *also* thinks I am worth the effort and emotional risk of romance. And by the end of the first date, he'd better f*cking know the state where I grew up. I would rather hold out for a feast than settle for crumbs again. I hope I don't starve.
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