jp1
4-18-22, 10:19pm
There have been a number of threads over the years here about checklists for dating and so forth. I never had a formal checklist that I consciously ticked off when dating someone new but I had an informal idea of what was important to me.
For example, one of the key moments in my early dating life with SO happened when we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. He had moved to NJ a few months before I met him and early on had mentioned that one of his bucket list items was walking over the Brooklyn Bridge. I had lived in NYC for 15 years at that point and was well aquainted with the Brooklyn Bridge. With this in mind, one sunday when we'd been out doing this and that, late in the afternoon I said "I have one more place I want to go." and I got us on the subway to the brooklyn side of the bridge. (I knew there was an entrance from that station that put you right on the pedestrian path of the bridge.) A few minutes into our walk across the bridge SO says "WOW! I didn't know Brooklyn had such an amazing skyline!" It took me a second to realize that he thought we were walking towards Brooklyn, instead of walking from Brooklyn to Manhattan. As soon as I realized that I said "turn around." So he did. And said "What's that?" To which I responded "THAT is the Brooklyn skyline." Which caused him to double over, laughing hysterically at his mistake. And he thought this was such a funny thing that when we got back to my apartment he called his mom to tell her the funny story. And literally for a week afterwards he was telling everyone he knew about this silly mistake that he had made. It was at that point that I realized that SO was a truly good person. Anyone who could laugh at themselves over such a goofy mistake and then freely share it with everyone close to them was worth keeping.
In the almost twenty years since that awesome Sunday he's proven that I made a good decision many times over. Most recently involves a situation that has just ended. As I have mentioned here before he's the regional HR director for a major hotel chain. The flagship hotel, where his office is, has 1500 mostly union employees. Because of the way union employees are hired he doesn't have reason to interact with any of them unless another employee lodges a complaint against them, they lodge a complaint against another employee, or there is an issue of them not doing their job, stealing from the company, etc. Nonetheless, every time I've been at the hotel with him he seems to know virtually every employee by name and often will have a casual conversation with them if we pass them in the hall/elevator/lobby etc. One of those employees, an older lady who worked as a banquet server, asked him five or six years ago to be her medical power of attorney. She was in her mid-60's at the time and worried about the future. She was decades estranged from her family and realized that she needed someone she could trust to take this on and SO was the only person she could come up with, even though he only casually knew her since she was a good employee who just quietly showed up on time every day and reliably did her job. He agreed to take on this responsibility without hesitation. Fast forward to the past month. She's been retired for about three years and wound up in the ER with liver and kidney trouble. (She had had hepatitis C many years ago and although she was successfully treated with the new medicine a few years ago the damage to her liver had been done.) For the past month he has been going to the hospital regularly to visit her and work with her and the medical team to figure out what the best medical plan was for her. And also has been helping her with things like naming a charity beneficiary for her 401k and making sure her rent got paid for this month in case she got well and could go home again, etc. Early this morning Abigail passed away. SO got the phone call at 5:40 am. So he got out of bed at the crack of dawn and went into the city and dealt with what needed to be done with the mortuary, etc, before going to the office and spending a full day at work.
SO would probably hate for me to be tossing this out on Facebook because he wouldn't want mutual friends to see me pointing out how great he is. He prefers to do good things like this quietly. But since he has never and probably will never come here I can share this here confident that he will never know that I've outed him as a truly awesome person.
For example, one of the key moments in my early dating life with SO happened when we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. He had moved to NJ a few months before I met him and early on had mentioned that one of his bucket list items was walking over the Brooklyn Bridge. I had lived in NYC for 15 years at that point and was well aquainted with the Brooklyn Bridge. With this in mind, one sunday when we'd been out doing this and that, late in the afternoon I said "I have one more place I want to go." and I got us on the subway to the brooklyn side of the bridge. (I knew there was an entrance from that station that put you right on the pedestrian path of the bridge.) A few minutes into our walk across the bridge SO says "WOW! I didn't know Brooklyn had such an amazing skyline!" It took me a second to realize that he thought we were walking towards Brooklyn, instead of walking from Brooklyn to Manhattan. As soon as I realized that I said "turn around." So he did. And said "What's that?" To which I responded "THAT is the Brooklyn skyline." Which caused him to double over, laughing hysterically at his mistake. And he thought this was such a funny thing that when we got back to my apartment he called his mom to tell her the funny story. And literally for a week afterwards he was telling everyone he knew about this silly mistake that he had made. It was at that point that I realized that SO was a truly good person. Anyone who could laugh at themselves over such a goofy mistake and then freely share it with everyone close to them was worth keeping.
In the almost twenty years since that awesome Sunday he's proven that I made a good decision many times over. Most recently involves a situation that has just ended. As I have mentioned here before he's the regional HR director for a major hotel chain. The flagship hotel, where his office is, has 1500 mostly union employees. Because of the way union employees are hired he doesn't have reason to interact with any of them unless another employee lodges a complaint against them, they lodge a complaint against another employee, or there is an issue of them not doing their job, stealing from the company, etc. Nonetheless, every time I've been at the hotel with him he seems to know virtually every employee by name and often will have a casual conversation with them if we pass them in the hall/elevator/lobby etc. One of those employees, an older lady who worked as a banquet server, asked him five or six years ago to be her medical power of attorney. She was in her mid-60's at the time and worried about the future. She was decades estranged from her family and realized that she needed someone she could trust to take this on and SO was the only person she could come up with, even though he only casually knew her since she was a good employee who just quietly showed up on time every day and reliably did her job. He agreed to take on this responsibility without hesitation. Fast forward to the past month. She's been retired for about three years and wound up in the ER with liver and kidney trouble. (She had had hepatitis C many years ago and although she was successfully treated with the new medicine a few years ago the damage to her liver had been done.) For the past month he has been going to the hospital regularly to visit her and work with her and the medical team to figure out what the best medical plan was for her. And also has been helping her with things like naming a charity beneficiary for her 401k and making sure her rent got paid for this month in case she got well and could go home again, etc. Early this morning Abigail passed away. SO got the phone call at 5:40 am. So he got out of bed at the crack of dawn and went into the city and dealt with what needed to be done with the mortuary, etc, before going to the office and spending a full day at work.
SO would probably hate for me to be tossing this out on Facebook because he wouldn't want mutual friends to see me pointing out how great he is. He prefers to do good things like this quietly. But since he has never and probably will never come here I can share this here confident that he will never know that I've outed him as a truly awesome person.