My Fiancée Whispered, “My Friends Think You’re Embarrassing. Try Harder.” A Couple Of Them Smiled.
My fiancée leaned in close enough that I could smell her perfume cutting through the country club’s expensive air and whispered like she was doing me a favor, like she was handing me a note I should be grateful to receive: “My friends think you’re embarrassing. Try harder.” A couple of them smiled immediately, small and satisfied, the kind of smile you give when something you’ve been thinking finally gets said out loud. I didn’t react. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t argue. I didn’t even let my face change. Noted, I thought, the same way I’d note a misfiled call number before returning a book to its proper shelf. Then I set my drink down, walked inside, got my coat, and stepped outside. I never came back. The next morning, she froze when she saw where my name no longer existed.
I’m 32. I’ve been engaged for 6 months. And I learned the hard way that some people don’t want a partner, they want a performance—someone to clap on cue, smile on cue, and take criticism like it’s love. I’m a librarian at a community library. Not glamorous. I know that. I catalog books, help kids with homework, run reading programs, and spend my days making order out of chaos in a building full of stories. I make okay money. Not rich, but comfortable. I like my job because it’s quiet and meaningful and stable, and it doesn’t ask me to be someone else to deserve a seat in the room.
My fiancée works in marketing at a fast-paced agency with big clients and bigger personalities, the kind of place where people talk in metrics and deck slides and “deliverables” like the words themselves are status symbols. Her friends are all similar. Corporate jobs. Expensive clothes. Weekend trips to wineries. International itineraries compared the way kids compare trading cards. The whole scene. When we met two years ago, she told me she loved that I was different—grounded, not obsessed with status. She said it was refreshing. She said her world was exhausting, and I was her calm space. I believed her because in the beginning she looked at me like the calm was something she valued, not something she planned to decorate.
We met at my library, which still feels funny to say because the library was never supposed to be the place where my personal life began. It was supposed to be a place where other people came to escape their lives for a while. We were hosting a community fundraiser—one of those evenings with folding chairs, donated cookies, a microphone that squealed if you held it wrong, and a room full of people who clapped because they believed reading mattered. She came in late with a friend, both of them in heels that clicked too sharply on the tile like they belonged in a different building. She looked out of place, but not in a helpless way. More like someone who was used to owning rooms and didn’t know what to do when the room wasn’t trying to impress her back.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
