In the last few months, I was "set up" with a guy who seemed, on paper, to have great potential. Intelligent, well educated, career commonalities, similarly politically minded, likely to be progressive in his values as he was brought up in the US but still traditional as his family was very grounded in Indian culture, well travelled, well read, blah blah blah. In short, possibly Mr. Right.
But he ended up being oh so wrong! Yes he's intelligent and well educated, but from talking to him further over the last few months, his education seems to be a path he drifted through primarily through parental encouragement but without passion. Yes he's similarly politically minded but that's really it in terms of his interactions with the rest of the world. He reads, he watches the Daily show...but he doesn't actually talk to people or believe in learning from the school of life. Yes he's done some interesting things like travel through India for a few months between school and grad school...but when you actually ask him what he did and why, he couldn't seem to come up with anything.
And unfortunately, he turned out to be neither traditional nor progressive!
Despite having a traditional family, he doesn't speak Hindi...ok so that's not a total deal breaker. But if you can't speak hindi, how are you going to sit through the dozens of bollywood films and hours of music I do?! :-) He also knew little about our festivals/rituals...and more importantly didn't seem to have much desire to learn. In fact, he was so minimally connected to his Indian-ness that, other than his name and skin color...and his parents...it was hard to tell that he was Indian. He didn't really seem to understand many traditional indian values or morality.
But he didn't balance that with being particularly progressive, either. For example, he had no sense of how to act on a date or how to romance a girl. You do NOT ask a girl to coffee/dinner for the first, second, or third time by text message a half hour before you want to go. No! A phone call is best but an email is a good second choice if that's how you've been communicating. Give her time to make sure she's free...and to get all pretty before meeting you! Oh and seriously, the fourth date/meeting you suggest really shouldn't be yet another coffee date. I shouldn't have to suggest that we graduate beyond that, no? And when you go out to dinner with a girl, shouldn't there be some effort to the whole thing - pick a nice restaurant in advance, maybe when you get there order some appetizers, offer dessert at the end...anything so there is a feeling that you are enjoying and maybe want to prolong the experience...not get in and out like a dentist's chair! You might say, it's just that he wasn't interested. And I wondered about that...but he would regularly text asking about going to dinner with no prompting or encouragement from me (always with little notice or advance planning...agh!) so there must have been some interest there.
Truthfully though, all his problems stemmed from the same basic thing...lack of passion and conviction in anything. No passion for his job, no passion for any particular values set, no passion for the people around him and his relationships with them, no passion in his dreams...basically no passion for life. And that's the biggest tragedy I can imagine...what's the point of living if you don't do it with conviction and passion? So perhaps he wasn't stupid so much as pitiable and sad. Because I would hate to live life like that...with no anchor, no purpose, no direction. To quote Thoreau:
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