Playing With Matches

As soon as my blind date arrived at the restaurant last night, I couldn’t stop sneezing.

Maybe I’m allergic to him. 

More likely, I caught my nephews’ cold.

A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail from my Aunt with the subject line, “Your Birthday Present.” 

She told me that she had lunch with a friend who knew a great guy in his 40s and wanted to set him up with my 25-year-old cousin. My Aunt vetoed her daughter dating him — but suggested me, her 30-something niece. This blind date, she said, was my birthday present.

I told her I’d prefer jewelry.

I talked to the guy on the phone. And we had a lot in common — we both grew up in Tennessee and moved to DC from Texas.

He sounded friendly. He kept saying, “I just want to welcome you to the area.” (Even though we moved here at the same time. I think I got here first.)

What does he look like? My friend Nina asked.

I have no idea, I told her.

Nina says that whenever she used to go on blind dates she would ask the guy to paint a mental picture for her. But that seemed kind of rude. So I went to the restaurant and waited until a guy with a comb over asked, Are you my date? 

He’s a really nice, good guy.

Halfway through the evening, I went to the bathroom, scrolled through my phone and tried to think of someone I could set him up with. I told him he should meet my friend Nina — a professional matchmaker. I think he’d be a good match for some of her clients.

He seems like a guy who should be married — he’s someone you’d meet at an office party as a coworkers really pleasant husband. He tried to get married four years ago — it was New Years Eve in New York. He thought it would be like An Affair to Remember when he proposed to his girlfriend. They had been together four years. Right after he asked her to spend his life with him, she told him she had been cheating on him the last four months.

That’s a sad story.He told me a lot of sad stories. Like his 80-year-old aunt who has never been married — one Passover seder his aunt had too many glasses of wine and told everyone that she was going to die a virgin.

I said that isn’t necessarily true — my grandma had a lot of boyfriends in her nursing home. 

My cousin and I found it upsetting that grandma was getting laid more than we were. (The nurses were always separating grandma and her boyfriends — but my mother told the nurses to leave Grandma alone. “I’m not worried about her getting pregnant,” mom said. “And if she gets an STD at this point — so what?”)