Hints and Guesses

In this story, there is a boy and a girl. The Girl meets The Boy at a conference, where some small connection is established. They meet again a couple of months later, where there seemed to be some more minor interest. And then The Boy came to seminary at the same school where The Girl worked.

Imagine The Girl at home with her cats one fall evening. It might have been a Sunday. It may have been a school night. Whatever the circumstances, she receives an email:

Someone *you know* likes you. And they’ve come to us to admit it.

Here at TheSpark.com we launched a web site that is revolutionizing crushes, dating, and affection. At least it makes the whole thing a little easier and a lot more exciting. And it’s not so *serious*.

The way it works is simple: Come to our site and list the people you know with whom you’d like to go on a date, just for fun. If you pick someone who picks you, you get notified.

You might match today - you received this e-mail because someone has already chosen you for their list.

http://www.thespark.com [FYI: this site is no longer active.]

Just click on the picture of me, Pimpin’ C.

-Pimpin’ Cupid

So The Girl goes to the web site, curious to find out who it might be. She must have entered twenty different names of men she knew. Not that she was interested in any of them, but she wanted to know who had sent that email.

And then she waited. And waited. And waited some more.

And after an hour, she received another email:

Pimpin’ Cupid here, reporting that you’ve just been matched with the following individual:

The Boy

Since you chose each other, it’s clear that there’s some chemistry. Where to go from here? It’s up to you.

-P.C. and the boys at TheSpark.

Well, well, thought The Girl, but she had little time to think about it, because it suddenly dawned on her that each of the men that she had put on her list had received an email exactly like the first one she had received, and that if any of them put in her email address…it was too awful to think about. She immediately went back in and deleted them all from her list.

It wasn’t long before The Boy sent an email:

Hey Girl!!
Pretty good guess, eh?

The Girl responded:

Indeed! An excellent one…but that beer drinking Pimpin’ Cupid threw me off track for a moment.

The Boy wrote back:

Well, your comment that you and E had a “lot to talk about” on the way home from the conference was a clue. I’m pretty intuitive. Plus, the invitation to join 6 degrees earlier in the week.

Now, here The Girl was puzzled. E and The Girl had driven to and from the conference together, and only once during their hours of conversation did she refer to The Boy and The Girl, and then only in the most oblique way. And six degrees was a web site that connects people…that whole six degrees of separation thing, so you can see how you are connected to other people…she’d invited a lot of her friends to join (think very early social networking—would you think someone was interested in you because they invited you to be their Facebook friend? That’s what I thought.). So whatever intuition The Boy had was wrongly directed.

So The Girl wrote:

As a matter of fact…well,  never mind.

The Girl decided not to burst The Boy’s intuition bubble.

To make a long story short, The Girl and The Boy exchanged emails over the next couple of weeks and kept to the same level of socializing as before, which puzzled The Girl. Why send an email like that and then do nothing?

Around this time, The Girl experienced a spiritual crisis, the nature of which we will not get into now. Suffice it to say that one day The Girl prayed for a dream. Once before in her life a series of dreams, unbidden, had resolved her entire childhood. So she thought that God could send her another to give her an answer to her spiritual crisis.

About a week later The Girl in fact had a dream, and she knew it was THE dream, but she didn’t know what it meant. And she went about its interpretation all wrong, forgetting that dreams are meant to be symbolic, not literal. She had no idea what it meant.

The next day was church. At the end of the sermon, the congregation had some directed small group prayer time, and the direction seemed to allow The Girl to share her dream and get some answers. The Boy was one of her prayer partners.

Under normal circumstances, The Girl didn’t like to tell her dreams at all. Somehow it seemed too private, and she was afraid of accidentally revealing something about herself that she didn’t want other people to know. But that day she threw caution to the wind, told her dream, and was brought up short when The Boy said he thought he knew what it was about.

Well…here she’d had her dream, and here she had someone to interpret it, and suddenly she didn’t want to know anything about it. The other prayer partners prayed, and then she fled to a private room. She wept, and she couldn’t stop weeping. She prayed, too, for peace, and for the strength to hear whatever The Boy had to say, because she knew that he wouldn’t tell her unless she asked, and she was going to ask.

Which she finally did, after potluck. The Boy seemed reluctant to tell her, perhaps because she seemed reluctant to hear. (The Girl has no idea what he told her that day…all she can remember is that it wasn’t as bad as she feared.) But what he said seemed helpful, and she couldn’t help but think that his helpfulness indicated some other level of interest.

They then had a short conversation in which they alluded to (without actually mentioning) their recent exchange of emails…and the vagueness beget more vagueness.

Later in the afternoon, H, The Boy and The Girl ended up at The Girl’s house and spent the afternoon talking. Somehow, while The Girl was in the kitchen getting hot chocolate, the conversation turned to dating. The Boy said that when he came to seminary, he had decided not to date. Again, she was puzzled—not anxious, just puzzled.

Finally, resolution arrived the next day. The Boy called and spent a good half hour talking about other things before asking, “What did you think about what I said yesterday?”

The Girl asked The Boy to repeat specifically what he was referring to (she’d had enough with the vagueness by this point), and he said, “My decision not to date while in seminary.” She said that it didn’t bother her at all (and it didn’t). The Boy seemed confused, and asked, “Why did you send me that Pimpin’ Cupid email?”

It was then that the light of revelation broke and the full extent of the situation became clear: The Boy thought The Girl had sent the first email, and The Girl thought The Boy had sent it. They had both been operating under different assumptions. The Girl was horrified to think that The Boy thought she had sent that email, since she would never have done that.

The Girl and The Boy are still friends, but they are each married to different people. They have never discussed this incident from that day to this, although that may be about to change. The Boy eventually broke his rule about dating while in seminary, but it must have been OK since he ended up marrying that Other Girl.

The Girl never did find out who sent the original email, but she suspects it was someone very much like her—throw in a bunch of email addresses and see what comes up. Dead fish, if you ask me, but you didn’t.

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