Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Pity is my friend

Fall 2003

I had always assumed at college it would be fun to move in with 2 of my 3 best friends from High School, but add the cousin of one friend to the mix and it was better than I could have even imagined. The first couple of days were great. Nothing but sports, music, and movies. There was no childhood bickering over what to listen to or what to watch. There was just a unspoken yet common understanding that we were just soakin' in hanging out with the guys. The epitome of the cliche "Bros before Hoes" (Sorry, no offense ladies, that's just the saying).

As history has proven though, all good things must come to an end. Somebody had to invite a girl over. It's not that I was against female presence in our apartment, but Mr. cousin roommate of ours decided he was going to be sporting a quantity over quality mentality for the semester. This meant that his innate filter chip (you know, the chip men are born with to help them instantly discern if a woman's beauty is truly only skin deep) was completely defective, and the overall intelligence level of our apartment suffered because of it. Another roommate seemed to be a tad more selective in his date-mates but not much. He seemed to delight in "helping" those girls who were destined to fail a class unless a hero of said roommate's sort came to their rescue. That was his definition of dating, which of course we were not allowed to call dating since he had a missionary. Yep, you read that right. He was waiting for her.

Lucky for me, the third and final roommate still had somewhat of a bitter taste in his mouth from a relationship gone south in high school. Couple that with lifelong deficit in dating skills as an overcompensated result from excelling in athletics, he remained my lone option to maintain some sort of commitment to BBH. I was committed to enjoying man time because of a recent freedom from a relationship myself. In my over-zealous desire to be the best salesman at our cell phone store, I had sold my way into the heart of an Irish girl (well, at least everyone thought her name sounded Irish). I subtly implanted my phone number in her phone the day I sold her said phone and within weeks she was planning our wedding. I'm all for love at first sight, but I'm pretty sure my instant thought was lust not love (you know, the innocent I'd like to kiss you kind of lust). Long story short, things didn't work out with the Irish woman. Now I wanted to take some time, maybe even the whole semester, just to enjoy my time with the guys from high school.

As luck would have it, one week later while my roommate and I were watching some baseball, a knock sounded at the door. My roommate went to see who it was. I could hear female voices and after a moment or two filled with intrigue I got up to see who it was. There stood two girls, one of which I slightly recognized. I must have seen her at church. The other slightly taller blond one I did not recognize which quickly led to embarrassment as they announced that they were both from our ward. The conversation that followed went something like this:

"What are you girls doing out and about?" Like I really cared but they were at my door so I had to ask.
"We were bored so we thought we'd see what other's were doing." Right... I feel a guilt trip coming.
"Bored? But it's a Friday night; why aren't you out on dates?"
"Oh, we don't really get asked out on many dates." Bam! told ya the guilt was coming. Note to the female class, guilt trips don't work! Ok who am I kidding, of course they work but they are very cheap so please only use them if they are one hundred percent necessary.
"Well shoot, you gals don't seem that bad. How about dates this Friday then?" It's not that the guilt trip worked, it was more that I took pity on the young ladies.
"Um... we're actually busy this Friday." Second note to you women: Don't guilt if you can't follow it through!
"What! You come practically begging us to ask you out and then when we do, you turn it down?"
"I know, I know. We're really sorry. But we're available the next Friday." And the pity kicks in again. See that is where women have the complete upper-hand when it comes to dating. Even though their plan completely backfired for a moment, a simple thing as a pretty face comes to their rescue.
"The next Friday it is."

And that's how it began. My wife used guilt and I took pity.