So Very Glad I'm Not Still Single

My best friend (we’ll call her “Jane”) was recently visiting, and she relayed a story that is just too good to keep to myself. Divorced and raising two children largely by herself, Jane not surprisingly finds it challenging to find the time and places to meet new men, and so has turned to internet dating as a method of simultaneously screening and meeting new prospects. Although a few have turned out to be perfectly fine candidates, there are always, of course, the genuine weirdos.

“Joe” was someone my friend had been talking to for a few weeks, first by e-mail and then by phone. My friend is quick to admit that she could tell this guy was a little odd, but friendly and funny enough that she continued to chat with him anyway. Then one night, as she lay in bed talking to him on the phone as he was driving somewhere, he said something that made her sit straight up. The conversation transpired something like this:

Joe: “WHOA!”
Jane: “What?”
Joe: “Uh…I don’t know if I should tell you.”
Jane: “Oh, come on. What?”
Joe: “Well, you know how sometimes you have, like, daydreams, except you feel like you’re really kind of seeing something but you know it’s not really there?”
Jane, a little confused: “Um....”
Joe: “You know, you just see something, and you know it’s not real, but it just seems so real.”
Jane: [Brief silence] “You mean like…hallunications?”
Joe: “No, no, not like that. It’s just…well, I just saw this monkey in a sweater behind me. I knew it wasn’t really there, but I just had to turn around and look. And of course, it wasn’t there, but it was just so real.”
Jane:
Joe: “Hello?”
Jane: “Are you kidding?”
Joe: “See! I knew I couldn’t be honest with you about this!”

I swear, folks, I spent 20 minutes alternately marveling at this guy and laughing my head off. I mean, I’ve certainly had the experience where, when you move your head quickly and something passes rapidly through your field of vision, you might think that the object was something completely different than what it was - leaves that look like animals, posts that look like people, etc. But this guy didn’t just see a shadow or something that resembled a monkey. In his rearview mirror, inside his car, he saw a monkey – and more specifically, a monkey in a sweater. That’s what Jane tried to tell him when Joe insisted that it was really no big deal. “You didn’t just think you saw something, you specifically saw a monkey in a sweater. That can’t possibly be good!” All I can say is, that one ranks at the very top of my ‘strangest people encountered in the dating pool’ list, and I am so very grateful to be married and out of that crazy market.