January 31, 2013
Life Lesson about Dating
I was startled when I read the title to the Email of the Day: My Father Found My Husband for Me. I thought I might have known this lady.

As a young man I never dated until I graduated from college. This was in spite of my parents encouraging me to find myself a girlfriend. I just didn't think I wanted the hassle of a girlfriend, since I was really struggling to pass my engineering classes.

But as a college junior, 20 years old, one of my dad's coworkers introduced me to his daughter, who was also 20 years old. She was absolutely beautiful! I had an opportunity to chat with her for a couple of hours at a holiday party our families had gone to. But even then I was too shy to ask her out.

As she lived in a small town about three hours drive from my home town, I thought I would never see her again and my experience with her would be just one more disappointing memory. Well, as it turned out, she and her two brothers spent several weeks in my home town since there were much better shopping and entertainment venues. So after those holidays, she and her brothers showed up at my dad's place of work where I had met her the first time, just to say goodbye. I was unsure what to do then and only after they were gone did it occur to me that that girl was giving me yet another (final) opportunity to ask her out, or at least say something about getting to know her. A while later my dad told me she had married some guy. I was very disappointed, and shocked, to hear that.

That was 38 years ago. I have now finally figured it out. That girl would have been a great friend and wife! And I couldn't have asked for, nor did I ever have, any better opportunity to meet a nice girl than for her dad to introduce us. But I messed it up completely. I was young and not perceptive at all when it came to social things. In fact I wasn't even on the same planet with most other people. Just call me "Sheldon Cooper" from the TV show "The Big Bang Theory." I have forgiven myself, but I still regret that mistake, even though I have been married to another lady for 23 years now. It still stings that I wasted so much of my life trying to recover from a single mistake I made as a young guy.
 
M.

Posted by Staff at 4:02 PM