Picking Up a Vibe - Part 1

As the midpoint of my seminary career neared, my roommate Mike decided to take an active interest in my love life—in part, to preserve his own sanity. Mike had begun seeing a young lady from church who drove a red muscle car, and she often dropped him off at the dorm after yet another of their dates. As the throaty rumble of her dual exhausts died away, Mike would bounce into the room to find me clipping my toenails and sighing loudly.

“Have a nice time?” I would ask, managing a weak smile in spite of my apparent loneliness.

After a few months of this sad spectacle, Mike took matters into his own hands. We sometimes hung out at the apartment his girlfriend shared with two seminary students, and I had become friendly with one of the roommates named Mimi. She had grown up in Maryland and once impressed me by singing a few bars of “Hail to the Redskins” as we all watched an NFC playoff game. Sensing an opening, Mike began encouraging me to ask Mimi out, thereby relieving himself of the necessity of living with a depressed and embittered soul. But I was having none of it.

“Mimi would never go out with me,” I insisted. “She went to Johns Hopkins and makes fun of me for graduating from a ‘football factory.’”

“That’s what women do when they like a guy,” Mike responded with an air of confidence. “Listen, I’m picking up a vibe when she’s around you, so this is in the bag.”

To that point, I had not been aware that “vibes” played a significant role in male-female relationships, or that Mike possessed any special ability to detect them. But he seemed to know what he was talking about—and he was dating a girl with a red muscle car. So I decided to follow his advice.

Shortly thereafter, I maneuvered myself into an opportunity to accompany Mimi on a Costco run. And though she didn’t seem particularly friendly as we shopped, I chalked this up to my previously established ignorance of vibes. And on the way home, I asked her out.

Twenty minutes later, I slumped into the dorm room that Mike and I shared, carrying more peanut butter than we could consume in 6 years. Seeing the look of dejection on my face, Mike’s eyes grew wide with disbelief.

“She said no?!” he cried, before peppering me with questions about the trip, all of which were designed to infer that I must have taken some wildly wrong-headed approach and ruined a sure thing. But I had an alternative explanation.

“So much for your vibes,” I spat. “And I hope you like peanut butter.”