SO Amused!

I have to give you some back­ground to under­stand why I’m amused right now.

This week, Sam received email from a woman he knew before he met me. He saw her a grand total of three times well over five years ago. She had a book of his that she want­ed to return to him, so we met her in the cof­fee shop at Bor­ders last night. She knew about me ahead of time, includ­ing the fact that we’re in a deeply com­mit­ted rela­tion­ship and have been togeth­er for five years.

She was dressed up way too much for just see­ing an old friend to return a book. She was, in fact, very overdone—Sam and I have been jok­ing about a Three-13¹Mar­velous but pricey full-ser­vice salon Inter­ven­tion Team this past week and he said after­ward that she could have used one. She was very glit­tery. Not that glit­ter is bad, but it was out of con­text and she was try­ing too hard.

Her body lan­guage was total­ly Sam-centered—she shook hands with me limply when we were intro­duced, and that was it. That did­n’t real­ly both­er me, as I was busy check­ing out the lat­est books about fibromyal­gia and doing a lit­tle NaNoW­riMo-relat­ed research. I was sor­ta in and out of the actu­al cof­fee shop. 

They obvi­ous­ly had noth­ing in the world to talk about until Sam final­ly brought up her spir­i­tu­al stud­ies. I’m pret­ty sure we were expect­ed to be impressed. I could­n’t man­age it. He was clear­ly bored out of his skull and try­ing to find a way to escape. Have I men­tioned that Sam does not do bore­dom well?

After we got home, I explained some of the unspo­ken chick-dynam­ic stuff to Sam. There’s usu­al­ly an unspo­ken com­pe­ti­tion going on when­ev­er two females meet, espe­cial­ly if there is a male of mutu­al inter­est involved. Because I did­n’t both­er to dress up to meet her or get wor­ried because she did get all gussied up, I won. Because he’s the one who made the excuse to leave way before she was ready to let him go, I won. Because he imme­di­ate­ly focused on me every time I so much as shift­ed posi­tion, I won. And because she was try­ing way too hard to “catch” an already-caught man, she lost.²This weird com­pe­ti­tion is some­thing most women seem to engage in instinc­tive­ly, espe­cial­ly monog­a­mous women. Those of us who aren’t wor­ried about com­pet­ing actu­al­ly have an edge—go figure.

So today she calls Sam to tell him she can’t be involved with him unless he’s monog­a­mous with her. Aw, darn—can you tell how very dis­ap­point­ed he isn’t?