JUST ONE THING
I was working for a community service organization at a little factory we had set up. My colleague and new friend, Joe, taught low income/under privileged teens jobs skills in the mornings and I ‘employed’ them in a wood working shop making wooden toys for kids in the afternoon. Joe was a bit of a wisp of a man. Quite petite with a forward stoop that made him look even smaller. He always wore a nondescript suit jacket with an open white collar, both articles of clothing bearing the ‘soft around the edges’ look of multitudes of previous appearances. He was so quiet but commanding, that when he spoke, it was like you were sucked into his works like a water over a falls. It was his slightly humorous smirk that gave him away.
Of course, there was one particularly attractive woman in the main office, and being a small staff, that we got to see fairly often. So, both being single, she was a common topic of conversation and hopes between us. Surprising to me, even though she was in her early 30’s as was I, she showed little interest in me and quite a bit in Joe, 18 years my senior. He finally gave in and asked her out to dinner.
If you were a young man with not a lot of female company in your early 30’s you might understand my antici…pation and eagerness that Monday morning, as I bolted into work to find out what happened on the date. Expecting Joe to be excited (I should have know better), I practically had to drag the details out of him. “Well” he says, “I picked her up at her house, walked her to the car, and she said something I didn’t like, so I walked her back to the door.”
I, of course, was incredulous. “What??!! She said something you didn’t like and that was it??”
“Yep.”
“What was it?” I blurted. Joe, in his usual waterfall way, nonchalantly says…”Don’t remember.”
This interaction was way beyond my years. How could he just turn down a beautiful, nice woman for saying one thing that he didn’t jive with???
Well, I finally learned years later (with a little help from Shakey Jake in the “You Know” story), that part of the ‘cover up’ that some men do is to ignore things that a love interest will say in order to not disrupt the relationship. But really, if someone says something that is an example of having different values than you, they probably have different values than you. It’s not a fluke, or a side remark, or something to be glossed over. It represents how they are. They are probably always going to be that way. So either accept it as a difference you can live with, or walk them back to the door.