About S.

While out shopping on Saturday, I ran into an old friend. I hadn’t seen him for years, so I overcame my aversion for Saturday afternoon coffee shops and invited him to join me for a cappuccino so we could discuss old times. He appeared a little despondent when the conversation turned to his family. In particular, he moaned about his wife’s seemingly countless ‘foibles’ – those quirks, ticks or mannerisms that everyone has, which others often find charming  or even endearing. And so it was with his wife, when they first met and love was new. Even I could remember how happy he was when he first met his then wife-to-be some twenty years ago.

It all started with a harmless dinner in a cheerful local eatery. He was so taken with her he hardly noticed the drab décor or the mediocre food. All he could recall on the next day was the midnight kiss on the doorstep of her apartment building. A second date followed and then a third. His desire to impress her meant that each had to be more impressive than the last. At the sushi restaurant, he found her adorable as she fumbled hopelessly with her chopsticks. Finally, she had to skewer the Yellow-Tail with one of them if she was to eat anything at all. On the third tête-a- tête, he invited her to a five-course dinner at a swish restaurant. There he watched, with some small irritation, as she grasped fork and knife vertically in her fists and banged them on the table. Here, at the latest, he should have had some warning about his future wife’s quirks. But my friend was generous: these were minor details. Who knows how many more of these oddities he encountered over the course of subsequent rendezvous, yet he now complains about ‘foibles’? He is a psychologist, by the way; he knows exactly what happened back then.

That was all 20 years ago. ‘I was in a commitment trap,’ he admitted. He had already invested a great deal in her. To find her mannerisms annoying would have been incongruent with his emotional and material investment. To free himself from this dissonance would have required either that he reverse his earlier decision and dump his girlfriend, or that he downplay the annoyance of the quirks. As fate would have it, he chose the second option.

The next time I met my friend, he was the one doing the shopping. He had just bought a new tie for that evening’s rendezvous…with his secretary.

Related posts:

• The Psychological Obstacles to Charitable Giving
• Trading advice
• Downgrade
• An Evening at the Opera? Not Quite
• Advanced Haggling - Pious Pilgrims at the Bazaar (Part II)