Many years ago, now, I happened to be working in a large
office on V-Day, and one of my co-workers had been trying to work up the
courage to ask out a woman from another department for nearly as long as I had
known him. As far as I know he had no reason to assume failure; there was no
great gap in age, rank, social status, wealth, education or relative
attractiveness, and the woman in question wasn’t seeing anybody at the time.
But my co-worker was (and presumably still is) painfully shy, and had been
unable to even to speak with her beyond some occasional light banter.
Consequently, nobody in the company knew he had a serious thing for this woman –
not even the sort of office gossips you would expect to trade in that kind of
information. I only know this story because he told me about it after the fact…
Anyway, for reasons unexplained (and probably inexplicable)
my co-worker decided to have flowers delivered to the woman on Valentine’s Day
with no note on it, not even a “Guess Who?” He settled on something nice, but
not too showy, and planned to watch the delivery, wait for the usual round of
admiration and speculation from the other people in our office, and then at the
right moment fess up to being the guy behind the gift. I think it gave him an
out – if the woman in our story was offended, outraged, disgusted, put off or
whatever, he could just fade into the crowd and never admit to knowing anything
about the situation. Whether you choose to see this as unfortunately timid or
endearingly bashful is up to you, of course…
Unfortunately, in the event, it turned out that the woman receiving
the flowers wasn’t quite as broken up from her ex-boyfriend as my co-worker had
believed. She (quite logically) assumed that the flowers were from her ex,
asking for another chance, and called to thank him. Her ex-boyfriend, who
apparently hadn’t wanted to break up in the first place, seized his opportunity
with both hands (whether or not he accepted credit for the gift wasn’t clear,
but wouldn’t have mattered in the long run) and took the occasion to re-start
their relationship. In hindsight, my co-worker admitted, he couldn’t blame the
guy; he says he would have done the same thing, given the chance…
Would this story have come out differently if he’d had the
nerve to put his name on the delivery? Or just go over to her desk and take
credit for doing so? We’ll probably never know. Even if the gift-giver in our
story made it through the day with face unslapped and actually got to date the
woman he had the crush on, there’s no reason to believe that anything would
have come of it. But I told you this story just on the off chance that somebody
out there reading it (assuming anybody is reading this) is planning a similar
stunt today…
I can’t tell you if your equivalent of this gesture will get
you the person of your dreams, or a short but savage beating at the hands of a
jealous boyfriend, or just a bill from a florist and a sad story for one of
your associates (it would be a bit of a stretch to call him a friend) to blog
about decades later. Maybe your story will turn out differently, and maybe you
should drop the whole idea and try something else. But whatever you do,
whatever it takes, find somebody to love. They’re only words on a computer
screen, and you’ve heard them before, but you’ll be a poorer human being if you
don’t take them to heart…
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone...
No comments:
Post a Comment