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My (Mildly) Roaring 20s: The Moment You Know It’s Not Going to Work

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For some people (and for art gallery owners in movies), there is an exact moment when they know the person they’re dating is the one. Before Alan, I’d always been much better at identifying the exact moment when I knew the person I was dating was definitely not the one. My senior year of college, in a very cliché moment of life, I started seeing a guy named Sam. He didn’t go to my school, but he was in a band and had cool band-guy hair. Those two things alone were his most memorable attributes, and I let it slide that we had almost nothing in common. After all, his hair – the cool hair – and my appreciation for it, seemed, at the time, like the building blocks of a solid relationship.

After a few dates, however, I began to wonder if we’d be able to make it work. Our evenings of eating pizza together were oddly quiet, but he was a nice guy, and in a college world full of frat guys, you could do a lot worse than eat pizza with a nice guy in a band.

Halloween rolled around, and in a moment of costume brainstorming, I had a brilliant idea. “I know,” I said feverishly, my excitement growing by the second. “I’ll wrap myself in aluminum foil, stick Al on my back… and be an element!” I beamed at him. When he kept looking at me blankly, I went on, “You know, like on the periodic table.”

Finally, in the most telling moment of our humdrum relationship, he said, “What’s the periodic table?” And in that moment I knew we would never work. He pushed a lock of hair off his face, and I watched it spring perfectly back into place.

We stopped seeing each other soon after, but I always thought it’d be funny if we had made it to Halloween if he matched my costume by covering himself in salt and being the element sodium.

Have you guys had moments in your relationships where you definitely knew it was going to work or not? What happened?

(Top image source via All Women Stalk)

Last modified: January 10, 2019