Skip to main content

Mellowed

A few days ago, a vendor took a bunch of us out to dinner. The group consisted of three single women and myself and two married men. After a few drinks, everyone was feeling mellow and and two of the ladies got talking about ex-boyfriends. Most of the stories were downright hilarious - it is what hindsight and the passage of time often turns heartbreak into. As they shared, the ridiculous nature of their once romantic relationship became painfully obvious. They laughed and we along with them. The third woman, the youngest in the group, was not quite as forthcoming but an occasional reference to a former boyfriend did come through.

The men shared no such stories but they prodded the women to sharing more once they had begun. I have seen this theme repeated in many social gatherings involving men and women who are good acquaintances but not really friends. The girls will talk about boys they had once been with. Little things at a dinner table will trigger memories - the one who made a mean creme brulee, the one who was a wine connoisseur, the one who was a cheapskate when it came to tipping - the list goes on.

You sense a mix of nostalgia and disappointment in how these stories are told. Each failed relationship becomes to a woman of a certain age, a mile marker on the long road that failed to take them to a home and family of their own. One drink too many and they will talk about it if only to make light of something that weighs on their mind. For a man, perhaps it is a little different. Each woman that came and went from his life life, is a notch on the stake of their manliness - an accomplishment even if not a whole scale conquest.

A dinner with co-workers is not the best place for them to engage in manly braggadocio. Not surprisingly, they hold their peace and enjoy hearing it about it from a woman's perspective. As they hear, it might cross their mind that somewhere an ex-girlfriend after one margarita too many, must be reminiscing their time together as well just as these women around his dinner table are doing. That must offer some satisfaction.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...