Matt sort of gets the short end of the stick on this blog because he broke my heart, but it’s not that there aren’t good things about what we had.
I remember particularly when I first brought Matt to visit my parents. He was nervous. He was convinced that my parents would hate him for “corrupting” their daughter (although I tried to reassure him that I had been corrupted long before he showed up). Really, he had more going for him than some of my boyfriends. He was military, for one thing (my mom was an Army brat). And he drove a cool car (in like Flynn with my dad and one of my brothers).
But he was still nervous.
Instead of just shutting down and refusing to talk to my parents, though, he decided he was going to do his best to impress them. He’d been stationed overseas for a while and had learned a local tea custom. He knew my mom liked tea, so he gathered the supplies and then offered to make tea the traditional way for her.
I think my mom was a little taken aback by it, but she agreed and watched quietly while he did the whole ritual or whatever it was.
And then she said, “Oh, that’s nice,” as she drank her tea.
Matt was crushed. He thought it meant that she was not impressed and she hated his guts, even when I tried to explain to him about Midwesterners and how, “That’s nice,” is about as enthusiastic as they ever get. He did not believe me.
The point here, though, is that he went to a whole bunch of effort to impress my parents, and even if all he got was a, “That’s nice,” from my mom, I was impressed as all hell.