Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Why so aloof? There's the kid . . . and the crazy Asian mom, too

A few posts back, I mentioned Sonya.  Sonya was, by a fair distance, the hottest chick who ever wanted a relationships with me.  Sonya was a black-Asian mix who was just the most exotic looking thing you've ever seen.  Very demur (other guys find that sexy while I don't).  She was casually fashionable.

Sonya and I became friends in college.  We were in the same major and we ended up doing group work one semester that required us to meet in the student center during nights.  Yes, my best game has always been while being the smartest guy in the room -- remember this lonely nerd boys!! 

Sonya had a son, the nappiest little black son you ever met in your life.  She couldn't always find a sitter and sometimes the kid had to come to group work with her.  I was the only person in the group who didn't treat her kid as a giant inconvenience.  I come from a family with legions of nieces and nephews and little in-law off-spring.  So, I have a lot of experience dealing with kids that aren't my own.  Kids and I get along well.

One of the funny things about Sonya is that she set off competitive streaks in other women like you will never see.  There was a girl, R, in that study group that I had been chasing the previous semester who floored me hard with a brutal rejection.  But, the minute R saw me and Sonya chatting it up, R turned into the sluttiest attention whore in history around me.  If you read my earlier post about Olivia, you'll see a similar reaction.  I didn't think much of it at the time, but Sonya was so hot that other women perceived me as sexy anytime they saw me with her.  An early instruction in female craziness.

I remember one time R and I had been sitting in our weekly night session early, talking before everyone else arrived.  And Sonya came in (no kid this time) dressed in her lazily fabulous way.  And, again, remember that R pretty much rejected me as "no way, no how, not in any universe" the previous semester.  R was laying it on thick, saying shit like "You wanna sit on my lap" and laughing it off by saying "I guess I really shouldn't tease like that".  Sonya set off a seriously fucked up form of derangement in other women. 

Sonya was always quiet and soft about everything.  She never spoke up.  Half the time she barely rose above a whisper.  But, man, other women were sent into some type of hypersexual bitch mode when Sonya came in the room.

Thankfully, the group session ended.  Over the next couple years Sonya and I stayed friends.  And, Sonya made it clear that if things were the way she liked them to be we would have been more.  Sonya, like a lot of young women in that situation, fell back on the orbit method. 

Particularly at that time in my life, in my early 20s, I was not wild about dating a girl with a kid.  But, the real stake in the heart was Sonya's mother. 

I never asked how the living arrangement worked, but Sonya lived with her mother.  Her mother was the genuine article, an old country Asian mama with marginal skills speaking English and an evil eye for every man she met.  Sonya's Asian mother got to the point she bothered me so much that if I saw the two of them out in public, I would try to sneak away before Sonya spotted me.  I wanted no part of the old lady.

The last summer I was in college (I ended my college tour during that summer session, BTW) I would see Sonya in the hallways of our department's building.  I remember we got to talking the one day and she asked me about the next semester.  I told her I was done.

Sonya was visibly crestfallen.  She was looking down at the floor and mumbled something about "I thought you had another year."  I think Sonya just assumed we had entered school at the same time.  I was half a year ahead of her and graduated an additional half year early, leaving college with two degrees in a shade over three years.

It's one of the tougher moments for me.  She didn't cry or anything.  I think I could have handled that.  Instead, she stood there stunned, looking at the floor.  I could see her doing the internal math and arriving at the sum of "oh . . . fuck . . ."  I told her I was only going to be around about two weeks more and then that was it.

So, she smiled and we wished each other well and parted ways.  After that she didn't say hi to me anymore in the halls.  She had settled on dying with a whimper for her orbiting friendship that would never go further.

Sonya I think about particularly because in hindsight she reminds me of a basic thing women often bet on with guys.  Women work from the notion that if a girl and guy have some a friendship that that bond will always pan out into romance.  There's sort of a founding myth of womanhood that The Right Man will be your bestestest friend in the whole universe.

With Sonya, there was a lot going on to convince her of the case for "Us".  We were in the same major.  She was an undeniably attractive woman -- and those girls grow up with people telling them all kinds of shit about how they can land any man they want.  I was good with her kid.  And we were good friends.

If I'm being dishonest, I'll say it was her mom that put me off.  If I'm being honest?  It was the kid.  I have to be honest . . . the notion of dating a very exotic looking dark-skinned Asian girl and toting along a very black-looking black kid didn't appeal to me.  Yes, I admit, I was young and dumb.  I was scared that we would look like freaks. 

Also, frankly, Sonya never jumped out me.  She was nice.  Too nice.  Too quiet.  Too demur.  Too soft.  I tend to like confident women and Sonya was anything but.  She was a pretty girl.  Like a lot of pretty girls, she was very nice because the world had never beaten it out of her. 

I feel like a terrible person for how I treated Sonya.  I know women with kids have a hard time.  Non-white women often have a hard time.  And the truth is, the presence of a child and the racial issues with her and that child paired with a blond white guy bothered the shit out of me.  I looked at Sonya and me and her kid and I just couldn't picture how that could ever be a working thing.

So, there ya go . . . that's how I pretty much completely fumbled an easy score with a total 10 who desperately wanted to be my girlfriend.

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