White collared shirt

When I met Marvin, I was neither baffled nor utterly impressed. But I was curious, everything about him was so different from anything I had ever known. There was no rush of passion or longing, simply a structured phase of getting to know each other which led to a test phase of being together.

Since my passion and lust have gotten me into tricky situations, I was proud to do things the healthy way this time. But we were so very different. We were on opposite sides of every spectrum imaginable. In the beginning, we would sit across from each other drinking beers and sharing our stories until 3 am. I should have known then, that it wasn’t a good match. I could feel how he didn’t understand the depth of my stories and yet his own seemed to drag on forever, boring me intently. I don’t know where the illusion developed that we were a good fit. Maybe I was just glad to have met a nice guy for once. We sat there one evening close to 3 a.m. when I told him about Thanksgiving. He didn’t know much about it except for something about a turkey. I explained how it was a holiday that I celebrated with family and friends, for which we cooked for two days and decorated a beautiful long table. It was an annual event I was very proud of. I would pick a dress and my friends would come in dresses and white collared shirts. He huffed a laugh and theatrically threw open his closet doors to prove that he didn’t even own a white collared shirt. He laughed at people dressing up and pretending they were something they were not. I think I was supposed to catch on to the joke and laugh as well. But I felt offended by his reaction. 10 months later we had gone through several ups and downs but had found a middle ground, so we only argued once a week. But Thanksgiving was just around the corner.

That year’s Thanksgiving dinner was even bigger, even greater and the expectations were even higher. For my mother a white collared shirt would not suffice, and all men would be wearing bow ties. Marvin showed up with a shopping bag in one hand and a sad bottle of wine in the other hand. He changed in my room, carelessly ripping off the tags of the white shirt. It was simply a button-up white shirt without a collar. He explained how he was only doing this for me and that the collar would have been too much. But when we walked into the dining room he looked around and felt foolish when he noticed he was the only one not wearing a bow tie. Leo, my sister’s longtime boyfriend, asked me to help him tie his bow tie. When I was finished, Leo turned to Marvin and jokingly commented “We should switch girlfriends, mine doesn’t know how to tie a bow tie, and you don’t even have a collar for one.”. Leo laughed at his own joke.

I wonder if Marvin ever asked himself how things would have turned out if he had simply respected the family tradition and worn a shirt with a damn collar for one evening. But luckily someone else had been wearing a bow tie and a white collared shirt that evening. “Wow, you even thought to wear a bow tie!”, I had greeted him, and he had proudly replied, “Of course! It is an honor to be invited to your family’s Thanksgiving.”. With the blink of an eye, Marvin’s story came to an end, and I was catapulted into a new fiery love story. I ended things with Marvin with the same passiveness and indifference he had tortured me with for months. I’m thankful he didn’t wear a white collared shirt.