When did intelligent men become
so small minded? I had lunch with a friend today, Hussein, who i’ve known for
fifteen years. He works at a big bank, where he’s paid huge amounts of money to
do something very important. This is an intelligent man, whose opinion I
usually rate quite highly.
He’s married with two children. I
recently told him about Alex and I splitting up, as we’d dropped out of contact
after the birth of his first child. But he’d always been there for me in the
past and was a huge help during our wedding.
We met for lunch and it became
clear the person I am now wasn’t considered well by Hussein. Given we’d been
friends for ages, I told him I’d started drinking alcohol. Hussein is Muslim,
but given his colourful past I didn’t think it a problem to tell him.
To say he was shocked and
disapproving is an under statement. He immediately told me about a friend of
his who's now thirty eight, who broke up with someone and went off the rails, started
drinking alcohol and eating pork.
I asked what that meant in relation to myself. He
said I should move on and not leave it too` late, instead of enjoying myself,
drinking alcohol and dating (I’d also told him I was doing that). Apparently the worst thing in the world is to be a single thirty eight year old woman, who drinks alcohol and eats pork.
At least my family have the excuse they’ve never
experienced anything this country has to offer, staying within the tight family
unit and shunning all things Western. Yet here was this young, modern and
educated man, a British Asian Muslim telling me the same things they do.
Just because I didn’t fit into
the category of married with kids, I was a bit of a risk, this unknown quantity
hovering on the fringes of acceptable Muslim society who’d fallen by the wayside
and now, after her marriage had broken up, had started drinking and dating
unsuitable men.
He asked about Asian men – was I
dating any? I said no and realistically, what Asian guy wants to be with me? He
started to list my positive points and I said an Asian man my age is probably going to want a woman who’ll fit into his family and listen to him. I don’t
have a good track record for listening to others, least of all anyone related
to me, and did I forget to mention, I don’t fancy Asian men? I can’t help it,
it’s like a man preferring blondes over brunettes. I just like Caucasian men.
So shoot me. I think Hussein wanted to at that point.
I realised this lunch
was not turning out the way I’d thought. I found Hussein to be predictable and
boring. I made do by asking him questions about his equally boring and
predictable wife and children and somehow got through the hour without him showing my anger and disappointment. Once again, I was hiding my true personality to avoid offending someone and to stop myself feeling like crap. Only this time, it was with a friend.
