Dearest Rachel –
You know better than most that I’m not a particularly social creature, honey. There are times when I can fake it – and on an individual, one-on-one basis, it may not necessarily be fake at all – but for the most part, it’s very hard for me to interact with new people, especially in a public setting. It’s often a matter of not knowing what to say in a situation, and so I fall back on the tactic of not saying anything.
But when my heart is set on connecting with a certain individual, there’s the understanding that silence doesn’t work. If I want to get to know someone – and maybe have that develop into something more – I actually have to talk to them. They won’t notice someone who’s trying to blend into the background; on the contrary, that technique is supposed to have the opposite effect, and it works a treat toward that end. But somehow, I develop a certain self-consciousness in those situations, and it all goes so wrong that I become a devotee of that great philosopher, Homer Simpson:
Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.
Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta), “Burns’ Heir” (Season 5, Episode 18)
But here’s an interesting twist: thanks to you, and my attempts to write to you, there are times when I’m willing to do something like this – something that I know will fail – just so I have a story to tell you about. And sometimes, it even seems to work out, to a certain extent.
The other day, I got yet another email from the one dating app I have yet to uninstall from my phone. Most of the time, I don’t even bother to check in on the profiles anymore; more often than not, the ones I do happen to have at least one or two items that I would consider red flags in terms of a long-term relationship, and conclude they aren’t worth the bother to cultivate. Some of them I sort of regret not contacting; one response in particular actually seemed rather heartfelt from a lady who happens to live here in town (and her photos were within reasonable expectations while also being quite nice for our age), but her frank discussion of her, ah, body count, doesn’t exactly endear to one seeking an exclusive commitment.
For whatever reason, I chose to take a chance on this email, however – and it was more of a chance than most, as her profile included only an initial (as opposed to a name) and no photographs at all – although one popped up shortly before I decided to write her back, and it wasn’t bad-looking (although it was badly taken, at an odd angle; perhaps it had to be oddly cropped in order to cut out the man that was in her life at the time).
It so happens that “E.” – because that was the name she put down in her profile, and would only reveal her name to those who asked – is a newly minted widow (as opposed to an all-her-life single or a divorcee). How new? Try barely a month. Yeah, that’s not a consideration that made it into her profile – although in fairness, there’s nowhere in a profile to indicate how long you’ve been single, and in most cases, that’s probably just as well – and a bit of a red flag in its own right.
But at that point, I’d already been texting her for a while, and thought it would be rude to just cut her off flat at that point. And while I pointed out through the course of our messaging that she shouldn’t be looking for a new man so soon, it appeared that she wasn’t on the app to find a new relationship – which sounds really strange when you think about it; why would someone go into a dating app if they aren’t looking for dates? – but rather, just trying to make friends with a wider circle of people.
It so happened that she and her husband (who had been more than a decade and a half her senior, for what that may or may not be worth) had come to America some fifteen years ago or so. They had become naturalized citizens as well, but kept mostly to members of their own ethnic community, and as a result, her command of English had remained (at least in her opinion) relatively rudimentary. But with his passing, her daughter had urged her to, if not get out into the dating pool as such, to find and make friends outside of that community – especially since most of them were more her husband’s age than her own, and as such, were starting to die off – and work on assimilating herself within a wider segment of society. So she wasn’t looking for anything more than a friend – or at least, a decent conversation, allowing her to practice her English.
For all that this information would suggest that I would be wasting my time reaching out to her, I agreed to meet up with E. yesterday morning in order to get to know her and hold just that sort of conversation with her. In preparation for the moment, I told Daniel about it – because the backstory seemed as odd as any of the ones I’d heard from others who had catfished me in the past, leading me to imagine the odd untoward situation that might befall me – but not the folks. He needed to know if something had gone wrong, but there was no point saddling them with that burden, especially since any such misadventure was highly unlikely, no matter what my overactive imagination might come up with.
As it happened, I needn’t have worried like that. Just like me, she showed up at this (mutually inconvenient; but then, she hails from the northern suburbs, so any halfway point would be so) coffee shop at the appointed hour. She was well-appointed – apparently, unlike yourself, she feels more comfortable in dresses and heels, and claims to almost never wear trousers (although when I showed her the fleece lining in my jeans, she expressed a certain admiration for their warmth) – and of slightly stockier build than her profile would have suggested (although I’ve no right to take issue with that myself). In both appearance and personality, if not in accent, she struck me as being much like my grandmother would have been like had I met her in her mid-fifties.
Which is to say that there weren’t what you call sparks between us; who’s going to be attracted in that way to someone who reminds you of a much younger version of your grandmother?
But bear in mind, that was establish from our initial chat; she wasn’t looking for a new man – and apparently, even if she was, she made it plain that she was looking for someone older than her, like her previous husband. While I’m essentially a peer of hers, I’m actually a little less than a year younger, so I wouldn’t qualify. So we walked into this knowing that this wouldn’t go anywhere, other than act as a practice conversation for her.
And to be fair, she had a handful of moments where she was lost for the right word or expression, and had to rely on her phone to translate for her. Mostly, this was due to slight differences in word usage (like the one between ‘pupil’ and ‘student,’ for which there’s apparently a distinction in Polish, but which are effectively synonymous in English, to the point where the former is rarely used for being archaic) or not being familiar with a word’s antonym (ironically, she struggled to express the opposite of the word ‘knowledge’; to be fair, a non-English speaker wouldn’t expect the word ‘ignorance’ to be the real term for what she at first referred to as ‘un-knowledge’) as opposed to being able to so much as hold a conversation.
Indeed, having been freed from the burden of trying to impress her towards anything more than the discussion we were having (and letting her do more of the talking, given her circumstances), the conversation went on for a long time; three hours, in fact, at which point, she had to leave because of another appointment she had, rather than either of us wanting to get out of there for any reason. Once the stakes are off the table, it becomes so much easier to deal with, I guess.
Which is nice and all – and as I said, it makes for an interesting vignette to relate to you – but it doesn’t really go anywhere, like the proverbial shaggy dog story. Even the lesson I might glean from it, that I can function just fine in a social setting when there’s no risk involved, merely highlights the fact that there’s no real reward, no payoff to such an interaction, either. True, much of the time there shouldn’t be a risk-reward analysis to a social interaction, but when dealing with strangers, there’s always some element of risk; why shouldn’t I expect some sort of benefit?
Of course, maybe I’m looking for that benefit in the wrong place, and I actually have some without being aware of it. In which case, maybe instead of asking for your eye upon me, I should ask you to knock some sense into my head about this incident instead. But either way, I’d appreciate it if you’d wish me luck either way; it’s clear I still need it.
Letters to Rachel 