Unbroken Glass

I’ve always hated to say “It’s not you, it’s me”. It’s even worse when you actually mean it.

My heart was broken. I had just been unceremoniously dumped by a guy who I was completely in love with. Put it this way, whenever I saw him strains of “Hopelessly Devoted To You” floated through my head.
So when they offered me a new guy, precisely three weeks later, I knew it was not yet my time. To begin anew, as they say.
But I decided to do it anyways.
Get back in the game. Back on the market.

I was not at my best. Possibly at my worst, ever. I was difficult, moody, depressed and very cynical.
My going motto at the time was ” F!@# love”.

We met at some hotel lobby.
Now if any of you have ever seen Bridget Jones’s Diary… remember the guy, the lawyer, who was madly in love with her while she was drinking herself into a stupor over Daniel Cleaver… so this guy, this Mark Darcy, was none other than my shidduch.
Not the real Mark Darcy. But his splitting image. And, true to the storyline, I was indeed drinking myself into a stupor over my own personal Daniel Cleaveresque lovelife.

Mark Darcy was a gentleman.
While I sat with folded arms, looking at him from beneath raised eyebrows, smiling cynically, and for variation, darkly, every so often, he tried to cheer me up, get me to come out of my shell.
He saw that I was broken. And he oh-so-manfully decided that he was going to be the one that made it all better.
“I like you… just as you are”… etc
I know, that line killed me too, at the time.
But I just couldnt take this guy seriously.
He told me I was a flower, that needed care and attention in order to grow and blossom. I almost puked.
On our second date, I began interrogating him about his past. Just to see if he was also a woman-nazi.
Just to get an idea of how many hearts he had broken.

But of course, he was okay. No dark secrets, no insanely twisted obsessions, nothing of the sort.
He said all the right things. All the time. He answered all my horrible questions softly, with just the right amount of charm and wit.

Another girl would have been ecstatic. But not me.
True to form, I was disappointed. Because he was such a nice guy.
What have they done to me, I thought.
And why do guys find it so attractive when the girl is completely disinterested in them. They love it. Is it a challenge? Is that it?

We went on three dates altogether, and at no one point did I ever let up or soften. When he began talking about how he didnt want his wife to be frigid, I knew that it was the beginning of the end.
Our relationship had reached its apex.
And it was time to go.

To be honest, I didnt even have the energy to dump him then and there.
So I excused myself and went home.
And ended it with him on the telephone.

It was the meanest thing I could think of to do. It made my day.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 27th, 2002 at 8:55 pm 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.