Amy and the "B" Word - Bashert? or Boyfriend?

In public high school, I didn't do much dating (read: almost zero). I played 3 sports, was on the Debate team, and was in honor classes, but I was still shy around girls. I covered it up by behaving in a reserved, serious, and mature manner.

I flirted with the Jewish girls in school and in local USY youth groups, and occasionally lusted after a shiksa or two. I assumed that the right relationship would eventually come my way just because it was supposed to.

Everybody in my immediate family, all my first cousins, and my aunts and uncles met their future spouses in high school, undergraduate school, or graduate school or immediately upon entering the working world. So I naively thought that the same would happen to me.

Though I was not very religious, I was a good boy. I thought, like frum people do, that dating was to find a future spouse, not for casual relationships.

So, I went off to college. Met a pretty, smart, and witty Conservative Jewish girl from Teaneck, NJ in my very first class on my very first day of college. It must have been bashert, right?

Ms. Bashert (“Amy”) sat down right next to me in the only remaining seat in the mandatory freshman English Composition class. We hit it off immediately and spent the semester exchanging that NY/NJ wickedly funny sarcasm and repartee that we Jews from the northeastern US find so charming.

I wasn't planning on getting married anytime soon, but being an optimist, I appreciated the chemistry, connection, and communication, that we shared.

Emboldened by our easy communication, my growing self-confidence, and my ameliorating shyness, I eventually decided to ask her to get together outside of class, and not just for proof-reading each others' writing, as we sometimes did for each other. You know, a date.

I called her dorm room and began to lower her defenses with charming banter about our class, instructor, and classmates. I got around to asking her for a date for a concert in a few weeks.

She said “yes”, but a few days before the concert, it was canceled because of the performer's illness. [A bad omen, no?]

A few weeks later, Amy and I were walking together after class and I again asked her for a date. She said that she would love to get together . . .

… even though she had a boyfriend. At another university. A guy whom she had started dating in High School.

***

 I hadn't understood how she had gone most of a semester without using the “B” word [boyfriend] in our conversations.

So I put some distance between us for the rest of the semester. Undergraduate life went on and for the next four years, Amy and I never shared another class but we bumped into each other from time to time, went out to eat a few times as platonic friends, helped a common friend though a personal crisis, and lived on the same street off-campus for a while.

On the rare occasions that we did spend time together, she flirted with me, probably using me for attention that her long-distance boyfriend could not provide. And I enjoyed the flirting, even though I knew it wasn't going anywhere.

I didn't meet any other woman as interesting as Amy during the remainder of my college career. A few I was attracted to, a few others were attracted to me, but with none enough connection to intrigue me.

My junior year, I did meet and get to know a lovely and intelligent Jewish woman who was in some of my classes and in the same major. She was stuck at school for Passover instead of going home that year, as was I, so I shared with her some of the kosher-for-Passover food that my mother had sent me. She was very grateful. Later in the semester, when I started to flirt with her, she (thankfully) told me right away that she had a boyfriend in Pittsburgh.

Are you beginning to see a pattern?

Next woman in the batting order: The Rabbi's Secretary's Daughter