Miss-Communication

"I don't understand you. You don't understand me. What ELSE do we have in common?" (A. Brilliant, Pot-Shots 1970)

Why must I portray the sleuth

Deciphering deceptions from within your truth?

Say what you mean, mean what you say

And cease this madness here today!

When one grows up in Orthodox Judaism, one doesn’t normally become exposed to the subtle, yet ceremonial dating and relationship games that people in the outside world play with and against each other. The religious Jewish world is fairly straightforward about the whole matter, with rules and other social norms governing the entire process of dating, marriage, and relationships. As I was raised, no meant no, yes was a pleasant surprise, and the two were never to be confused. In a religious marriage the delineation between yes and no is so profound that most of the time asking isn’t even necessary, and one knows the answer before one ever thinks of the question. As good as that seems to work for the Orthodox, in reality, it turned out to be a huge handicap in my dating experiences once leaving Judaism.

In a valiant, albeit vain, attempt to foster ideal communication and avoid problems, men and women, even outside the Jewish world, are also encouraged to say what they mean and mean what they say, in order to alleviate the common misunderstandings between people that could lead to horrible consequences. Men, in particular, have to learn how to accept rejection and respond properly by stopping whatever it was they thought they were going to be doing before they get to do it. That endeavor is a Utopian pipe-dream, and not anywhere near anything remotely resembling everyday reality. I’m beginning to imagine that lots of people were absent the day that the guidelines for affirmatives and negatives were lectured upon. It is because if this basic misunderstanding or ignorance that men and women continue to send each other mixed signals or become frustrated when trying to communicate their needs. I thought I was being the courteous and honorable sort by taking a woman’s word at face value, as I was raised to do, when in fact I only ended up either looking completely foolish or being badly bruised.

Here is my story.

My mother opened a small chain of furniture stores in the Detroit Area and I took over management of the stores in the late 80s. Next to one of our locations in the northern suburbs of Detroit, there was an insurance agency that employed an incredibly beautiful woman as a receptionist. As it happened, she was a smoker who took her break punctually, every day at 11 am, standing against the brick divider that separated my front window from her office door, her smoking hand crooked at a perfect 90 degrees making the journey back and forth from mouth down toward the pavement to remove unwanted ash and back again, as her cigarette slowly dwindled in size. Sometimes she would lean against the glass a little and I could catch the enticing outline of her hips and thighs. She was definitely easy on the eyes.

So being the good (and horny) neighbor that I was, I strolled over to introduce myself, say hello, and engage this enchanting creature in conversation. For the next few weeks, at precisely 11 a.m. each morning we would banter on about life, love, politics, relationships, and other miscellaneous topics du jour for a few minutes and then go our separate ways. One day, feeling more comfortable (and courageous) than usual, I asked her out to lunch. She immediately said ‘yes’, and that tomorrow would be fine. She put out her cigarette, and we parted company agreeing to meet at 11 a.m. the next day for our first official date. I left this little rendezvous elated that I had secured some social time with this really, really beautiful woman. I had gleaned nothing from our previous conversations to suggest that she was anything but sincere. Man. Was I wrong. (I say that a lot. Don’t I?)

Come the next day, I’m so excited about seeing her for lunch that I open the store two hours earlier than usual, finish anything and everything that needs to done for the day, and schedule a salesman from another store to cover my afternoon. I even “dolled up” a bit for the occasion, donning a newer shirt and a pair of my nicer jeans. That morning, time seemed to drag on forever. It was as if every clock in the entire universe had been reset to ‘let’s-keep-Shlomo-nervous’ speed, and my anticipation was not making things any easier to bear. I wait and I wait. Eleven a.m. comes and goes without a single cigarette being sacrificed to the gods of Marlboro. The woman never even showed up for work that day. She never called. Nothing. No word at all. I could only assume that something more important must have come up and that the next time we meet, all will be explained as unfortunate circumstance and another lunch date will be promptly scheduled. Man. Was I wrong.

The next day at 11 a.m., I look out my window and, lo and behold, there is this very same and still very beautiful woman standing in her usual position, casually smoking her morning menthol, making no gesture toward me either in speech or facial expression. I walked over to her, not without some trepidation, and politely asked her what had happened the day before. I also mentioned that I had been eagerly looking forward to our lunch date. Without even a glance in my direction, staring straight ahead at the passing cars, she responded with a very plain and emotionless “I know.” A light bulb then appeared above my head. You know that flash of realization that mockingly calls out from inside your own head and shouts “You are such a clueless shmuck, Shlomo Aronovitz!” I knew instantly what had happened, and what had been happening all along.

This woman AGREED to have lunch with me, but never WANTED to have lunch with me. Now, why would she do that? It took me a minute (I’m a bit slow on the uptake), but soon everything became crystal clear. Most every man she meets must be hitting on her, and in order to avoid any direct confrontation, especially when the person she is rejecting has access to her on a daily basis, it became the lesser of the evils for her accept my request and then later avoid it than to actually rebuff my advances directly. Saying “yes” allowed her at least 24 hours to come up with a plan as to how to evade the date altogether. I never took it personal. I realized that this was her way of dealing with something that probably happened to her a lot, and she had perfected this little diversionary tactic long before my mother rented retail space in her locale. I got the message, and thanked her. She smoked alone everyday thereafter, which was what she always dreamed of doing in the first place.

This was my first lesson in the reclassification of the word ‘yes.’ I thought, however, that the word ‘no’ was still solid as Gibraltar. Man. Was I wrong.

I met Sharon through a cable network dating service that was running ads on the late night cable access channel in our neighborhood. I punched in the right numbers, listened to her voice message, her requirements, and her likes and dislikes. She actually said she prefers Jewish men. Well who, I thought, was more Jewish than I? I left a short message of my own, and within a week we were beginning a new and exciting relationship together. What makes this episode even more disturbing than the previous debacle is that in the first incident it only took a week between the initial event and the readjustment of my vocabulary. With Sharon, it took over four years.

We did a lot of fighting during those years together and it became more a battle of wills (and wont’s) than an attempt at a livable, lovable truce. Eventually, we had to separate. I moved out in the hope that our being apart for a little while would give us time to re-evaluate what we had been through and possibly lead to reconciliation. I did love her very much. One day, as we were talking on the phone about bills and the dog and such, she broke the train of the conversation to tell me something very ‘important.’ You know, the kind of thing she probably wanted to blurt out right away, but didn’t have the mettle to come right out and speak it, so she tossed it out in the middle of something else hoping to deflect the blow of its effect. She informed me that she was now dating someone else who, she thought, was nothing like me, and she really admired that quality about him. That, of course, kind of stung a bit, but curiosity nudged me into asking “How?”

She described how they had gone out to a very nice restaurant. Once seated, he asked her if she wanted something from the bar and she answered “No.” She then said to me “He brought me back a strawberry daiquiri and I thought that was really sweet. YOU would not have done that.” She was absolutely correct. I would not have done that. Why? Because she said NO! No means ‘no’ where I come from, and I half-expected that a woman of advanced intellect and strong feminist persona would be the type to say what she means and mean what she says! I learned in those two minutes of conversation that even after four years of dating, we didn’t even agree on what NO meant! The whole time I was under the impression that no meant no or something really close to it. Man. Was I wrong.

So I now had to deal with the fact that two of the most basic words in the English language possessed practical applications and usages that were out of synch with Webster’s dictionary or my own cut-and-dry socialization. I began to wonder if I was the only one who missed the joke when these subjective and highly specialized definitions of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ were read aloud in class.

As it turns out, there are so many varying degrees and permutations of yes and no, that without the benefit of Omniscience or the Psychic Friends Hotline, the best one can do is ‘guess-timate’ what either word MIGHT mean, depending on the given context. It has become a matter of nuance rather than definition, and for those of us poor, unlettered souls raised without that kind of linguistic dexterity, the esoteric language of relationships may remain forever a baffling enterprise.