This excuse needs a proper burial
MY niece, 35 and single, is a nurse who works in a small-town clinic. When she is not busy saving lives, she hopes to meet men. But instead of deep-thinking, soft-spoken physicians, she generally runs up against oddball walk-in patients who either really like how she administers a vaccination or, after treatment, send her random e-mails that read, “I’m wearing only chaps.”
We in the family refer to her as the “freak magnet” because of her litany of nightmarish dating stories that make us laugh until we cry, like her latest tale of wooing woe: the guy who made a living by transforming the rubber from damaged tires into Chia Pets and selling them on EBay. And bragged about his profession.
But nothing compared with “Dr. Kildare” (reference point for youngsters: a blue-eyed specimen from ‘60s television). Unfortunately the doctor’s future did not include her, and she bought his heartfelt story as to the only reason why: He didn’t have the heart to break up with the girlfriend he already had. His seemingly sincere rationale? “I can’t leave her right now; her mother is dying.”
What’s up with this? It seems that whenever I turn my empathetic ear to a frustrated woman, there is a variation on the “mother is dying” story. It seems to have become the go-to line for fellows who want to let a girl down ever-so-easily.
It’s reminiscent of the infamous scenario in the movie “Moonstruck,” when hopeless fiance of Cher’s character cannot marry her even though he has already pledged his troth with the family diamond -- because his “mother is dying.”
Only in my niece’s saga, and now in other tales I’ve heard of star-crossed lovers, the declining party is the current girlfriend’s mother. And after all, it wouldn’t seem right to blame a guy for standing by his steady during one of her most unsteady life crises.
But I am beginning to wonder about this questionable form of breaking off a relationship, which I remember vividly from when I was in my 20s and working. The same escape tactic was laid on me three different times during heady office romances, the winner and still champion being the man who returned to me after 10 years of absence to tell me that he had been unhappily married for a decade and had actually always loved only me. But the reason he tried to break off his strangling engagement but simply couldn’t? You guessed it: Her mother was dying.
Do they actually think we won’t figure this one out?
Apparently so. In penning this diatribe for the newspaper, the male editor writes to me to say that I need to tweak a sentence or two in the narrative. “Must go now,” he concludes his abbreviated e-mail. “My dog is dying.” I reply with a sweet, sappy sympathy note, even going so far as to ask him what breed of dog and to tell him that I will be “thinking of him.” He then confesses that he had only been kidding, in light of my article. I nearly die of embarrassment.
Ironically, the skeptic who had set out to blow every guy’s cover had fallen for it -- yet again.