Unbroken Glass

So my friends set me up with an FFB. My first one ever.
The whole idea made me slightly nervous at the time, but I decided to go out anyway. Ach, I’m such a shidduch-lover, can’t pass up a chance when I get it.

I was taller than him, which gave me the immediate advantage. But he didn’t seem to notice, because he spent the next three hours straight talking.
Talking about halacha, talking about bekius be’gemara, talking about really really complicated stuff. I was managing to follow along most of the time, but I don’t think he really cared. I kind of felt like he didn’t even WANT me to be following.
I kind of felt like he was doing this for his own ego trip, trying to show as many people as possible how much stuff he knows about so many different things.

Well, he was in the middle of some halachic discourse, our coffees were cold, and I was beginning to get annoyed. But then he said something which I had learnt a few weeks previously and I knew it differently to how he said, and so I tried interrupting him. To tell him that from my limited knowledge and experience with these kinds of things, he was maybe mistaken.
He looked at me disdainfully and said, “look, you’ve got a pretty face. Let’s just leave it at that.”

I was slightly stunned. I mean, I’m really into halacha, and a good argument is pretty much what I do for fun. I felt deprived and, more than that, insulted.
Well, I don’t take well to either deprivation or insult. But TOGETHER, I mean that was IT.
I didn’t even bother to tell him off for being such a misogynistic idiot. I just kept my mouth shut.
For the rest of the evening.
He didn’t notice.
I mean, he carried on lecturing, arguing his finer points in a practiced and very annoying way, while I just sat there. Not even listening.
Fuming.

Well eventually he paid, and I got up to leave.
“I know it’s hard for you,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Well, I mean, it must be hard. I’ve heard you’ve been out with lots of girls and you’re probably sick of it. there’s no need to be mean though.”
He looked at me as if I was a weird green thing that had just landed on the chair opposite him.
“All I think is, that you have such a low opinion of women, and you dislike us so much, that I don’t know why you even bother to go out. I mean, why would you want to get married? Anyways thanks, I had a great night. I’ll be in touch with the shadchan.”
“No, no, no. Sit down. Now. What do you mean by all that?”
Look, his voice was assertive, but I wasn’t going to sit down. I mean, I was THIS close to getting out of there.
“Well, that’s all. I mean, that’s what I think. It’s not like you didn’t notice that you do this.”
Well, this guy was sitting there with his mouth hanging open.
Deflated. Like a birthday balloon.
“Please sit down,” he said more gently. “You’ve just told me something, and I would like you to please explain it.”
So I sat down. I figured it’s a few more minutes, and he looked like he needs help. or shock treatment perhaps.
He was very eager by now, all like “Okay okay, now psychoanalyse me! But be harsh! I can take it! I WANT you to be harsh! Don’t say any nice stuff!”

So there we sat, until three in the freaking morning. Me, psychoanalysing this weird yeshiva bochur. Him, with this ecstatic expression on his face.
Supposedly, he was a genius and one of the best guys in his (best) yeshiva. A few years older than me. And unmarried. And Picky with a capital P. He’d been dating for longer than my entire seminary put together, and I could understand why he wasn’t married, going around with that attitude. Not exactly charming, to say the least. But I think for the first time, somebody wasn’t patting his already well-fed ego, and he was loving it.

The whole thing was kind of sick, when I think about it.
But who am I to judge, I mean I was having a pretty good time just telling him all this stuff I thought about him, every egotistical, arrogant thing he had done since the beginning of the evening, I mean this stuff was just POURING out. Stuff I didn’t even know I had NOTICED, I mean there was a good deal of repression going on on my side as well.

Anyways we spent a wonderful few hours like that, drinking endless coffees and getting venomous looks from the waiters who were just dying to pack us out of there and get to sleep.

Finally I had to leave. He had this glazed, happy look around the eyes. Creepy.
I mean we went out a couple more times, but he definitely wasn’t what I’d been looking for my entire life. The other half of my soul, so to speak.

I don’t mind giving out free therapy though, so I humoured him. It was more interesting than sitting in my room and reading, I guess.
But all good things must come to an end.

Thanks lots for the help with writing this story, my little treehouse girl.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 16th, 2003 at 12:54 am and is filed under She. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.