One of the last girls I dated from match.com before I left Charlotte we'll call Phoebe. As with Andy, Phoebe had stunningly beautiful pictures posted on her profile page and I thought surely someone else would beat me to the punch. I started off sending her a quick, witty note and soon after I asked for her #. Home girl did NOT HAVE A CELL PHONE, which I found to be absolutely awesome in this day and age. So I called her on her home phone where she lived with her sister and her sister's husband.
We spoke for nearly 2 hours on the phone the first time, mostly of her upbringing in West Africa. I was utterly bedazzled by her apparent meager childhood. She went to a Catholic boarding school that had no running water. She would have to get up at something like 5:00 every morning to build a fire in order to heat the iron in order to iron her clothes for the day. When I asked her what restaurants around town she liked she replied "I don't know, I like that one that's called…Showmars?" Evidently she never ate out and hardly went out, scraping everything she made from her part time job to finance going to community college in order to become a nurse. Her sister was a chiropractor and her brother-in-law worked for IBM, both very intelligent. They lived in a gorgeous 3,500 sq ft house. And none of her sister's success seemed to spoil Phoebe.
After speaking on the phone several times I picked Phoebe up at her house (she asked me to come on in while she was finishing getting ready upstairs alone, evidently she had no fear of meeting the wrong person online) and we went to a low key sushi bar. While we were waiting outside a black man came up grinning ear to ear and shook my hand, I can only assume because I was a white man unafraid to date a black girl. Phoebe never had sushi before so it was quite an experience for her. Evidently she hadn't had a lot of American food before either, so that every time we went out she was turned onto something new ("Squid? Ewww, we don't eat squid where I'm from," referring to calamari).
She was very open, very honest and very humble. She went out with my friends and never voiced a single preference for anything other than what we were doing at the time. She was perhaps the easiest girl I ever dated, in the sense that I never stressed at all over where to go, what to do, whether she was having a good time or not, etc. She never asked me for (or made reference to me providing) a single, solitary thing.
However I soon found out that Phoebe's sister and brother-in-law were very strict when it came to spending the night with a man outside of marriage, and Phoebe was not allowed to spend the night with me. I began to tire of driving 35 minutes each way to pick her up and drop her off during the week, especially at 11:00 at night when I had to work the next day. Phoebe had 3 more years of school (1 more year of nursing and 2 years of school to become a physician's assistant) and I soon realized there was no way I could keep this up for 3 more years, and I broke it off.
I had never felt so guilty over breaking up with someone. I was mad at myself, mad at Phoebe for simply not being available to the degree I wanted her to be, and mad at her sister and brother-in-law for not letting her spend nights with me. Phoebe remains one of my all time favorite people I've ever had the privilege to know. She realized first hand what it was like to grow up in a land without the luxuries, entertainment and novelties that we take for granted in America. If only there were more like her in my own country.
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