More Notes from the Canadian honey jar…
Good thing nobody but me is ever gonna read this stuff!
May 08, 2017
…Where was I? Yes, “emotional investor”.
The reason I think we were going to the groomsmen/bridesmaids mixer was because he was there, and he’d been blatantly avoiding us most of the time leading up to the wedding. Because he’s a guy, he can flat out say he doesn’t like weddings and just do whatever he wants to do other than attend all the mixers and outings in the weeks leading up. I feel exactly the same way. I find it repetitive, dull, boring, pointless, and incredibly frustrating at how superficial all the activities and conversations are. But because I’m a girl, I have to smile and go along with it. So we were in the car, and of course there’s a lot of talk in general about business and investing, etc. That seems to be what every other person is doing in Ethiopia. We might have been driving with a couple of guys we didn’t know well, but who were clearly of that generation who are young businessmen and very rich and have no need to try to emigrate. When they do go abroad, it is to vacation or for business. I forget how it came up but I said something along the lines of what we really need is emotional investors. And he found it really funny and repeated it a few times. Clearly because it resonated with him.
Personality-wise we were quite similar. He too is a solitary kind of person who doesn’t like weddings but goes through them for people who are special to him. He can read for hours, likes to travel. Is looking for a partner but not children. A ‘just the two of us’ kind of arrangement with plenty of space for both. We seemed perfect for each other.
Well, maybe so, but what I remember from the wedding time was feeling extremely annoyed and alienated by him. By what he said when I said I live in Canada: oh is it because you couldn’t get into America? Which I thought was so beyond rude, but I just gave him a straight real answer of why I was in Canada, instead of taking the bait. Later, after the mels, towards the end of our night in Flirt, he said to me that he thought I was really awesome and special, and he knows he can be an asshole. And I think I said, though I can’t be sure, well at least you know it.
From his prior reaction to emotional investor, it was clear that he is looking for the same thing I am looking for, and yet he sabotaged any chance of that with the first words to come out of his mouth when I sat down to talk to him (the America thing).
So it’s interesting how a single habesha man and woman, who have so much in common, and are looking for much the same things in a partner, can’t connect because of all this other bullshit.
Maybe there’s no bullshit. Maybe I’m imagining a potential connection where there wasn’t any, and a clash where there wasn’t any either.
I guess to me he represents that ‘evolved’ habesha guy who really, deep down, probably isn’t. Yeah sure he says he wants to be with someone who can give him his space, who doesn’t want to start a family, who’s interested in travel and an intellectual life, etc. But from the way he treated me as a female, I have a hunch that at the end of the day he would prefer to be with a more ‘traditional’ habesha girl, (certainly one who knows how to cook!)
There’s no way a habesha guy who was born and raised in Ethiopia, who left after he was already an adult, is going to be okay with someone like me. I don’t care how evolved he claims to be, how different he thinks he is from other habesha guys, how un-traditional his expectations, at the end of the day that patriarchal bullshit will come out.
Rebecca Fisseha, Writer. 