Casement

Once, when my mom couldn't resist her compelling need to get me married, she went crazy on matrimonial portals and spent hours expressing interest in profiles, that she thought appropriate for me. I had told her clearly that I needed time to talk to each one and that I could not decide my life's most important decision in a matter of a few minutes. She assented.

So, that left me with chat sessions that covered my entire day and sometimes even ran into the midnights. I limited my chatting to two people on a single day.

I started my conversation with one of them, it started well, proceeded on the right track and ended on a nice note. We spoke sweet nothings about everything and everything about a few things that we had common interest in. It was not as intimidating as a matrimonial talk. It included, but was not limited to where I studied, grew up and expectations from my partner. It was a friendly conversation that led into exploring each other. At times, there was ";)" to denote good natured sarcasm and at times, we shared ":))" wide laughters. In all, I was successful in giving him a fair idea of who I really was and he was happy with his expression of who he was.

Towards the evening, I met the other person and the conversation started on the cliche - "I don't want to treat this as a matrimonial talk. Let's be friends and talk, so we could decide more freely about what we feel." The beginning was interrupted with some urgent work on his side. I sent my mail with my picture which he thought was a pre-requisite to a conversation. There were spells of uncomfortable silence. He sounded cold and high-heeled and I sounded the same to him. I tried to ease the conversation as much as possible from my end, but it never happened. I told him casually in a conversation that I had a thing for geeks...and he thought I was referring to him as a geek. Until then, I never knew it was such a profane word. He started criticizing me on that one statement. At first, I did not know how I offended him, but too quickly, I realized that I was getting offended. When I thought that no further fair conversation was possible, I politely bid adieu. He still pressed me for reasons and I had to tell him that I felt he was cold. With that, all hell broke loose. He accused me of indulging in psycho-analysis of his personality. Although, at the very first moment, wedlock became an impossible topic, I felt bad that I left a bad impression of myself on him. The day passed by.

The next day, I saw his nick glow in the list of my Yahoo buddies. I buzzed to apologize. Without going straight to the topic, I beat around the bush, with questions like how his day had been and what he was doing. After he answered those couple of questions, he seemed to be in a rush to tell me something with his "OK listen," "yeah...The thing is" and he went on to hand me down his piece of mind on not seeing a prospective wedding alliance with him. Like, I didn't know!:) Well, I agreed with him and told him that I was here to apologize for the misunderstandings caused, to which he acted indifferent. He said, he never felt that I was rude and he thought I was nice to talk to. Again, I felt this was another dosage of his cold aura.

Well, I am still unable to understand how I could, with the same personality be perceived of as two different things by two different people, on the same context in similar conversations. Strange are the ways of electronic communication!