Hashgacha pratit and back again

This week was my favorite conference, only held every 2 years and very important for my work.  I had 3 choices:  miss one of the two days, miss half a day and risk my plane arriving on the wrong side of sunset, screw shabbat, and stay an extra 2 nights in the city to leave Sunday morning.  That’s 4 choices, but right now I don’t feel like screwing shabbat is something that I want to do in public.  I had originally chosen the risky plane, but decided to leave early Friday morning while it was still dark to get an earlier flight, so I got back with plenty of time to spare.  I felt wiped out from all the travel, but pushed myself out to a large shabbat dinner.  

Within five minutes of my arrival, an attractive guy attached himself to me.  He turned out to be smart, thoughtful, traditional, adventurous, and religiously-inclined, and we spoke for the rest of the evening, oblivious to others.  By dessert, he asked me what I thought of love at first sight, and we spoke about dating-stam versus dating-for-marriage, and we agreed.  He was in his mid-20′s, 5 years younger than I, but I answered his questions about my life chronology imprecisely and he didn’t push.  He changed his plans to walk me home, and I had him up for a cup of tea since it was a cold night.  We spoke about Judaism, learning, observance, and shared our phases of religiosity:  he was Russian, and had been scooped up by a Charedi school soon after arrival, and it took him a while to come back to a normal relationship with Judaism.  We parted on warm terms, anticipating the next day.

 

For 12 hours, I was on a high:  I had sacrificed something important for my work, done the right thing, and not expected anything other than the reward of knowing that I had done the right thing, and yet had the magical experience of connection with an apparently wonderful person.  This next morning I had such kavannah while saying the modim, but then after davening, we exchanged brief greetings, and he didn’t give me a second look.  Synagogues breed gossip and ayin hara, and sometimes my inclination is to avoid spending too much time with any one person to avoid that.  For a moment, I wondered if perhaps he had that concern, but then remembered that hadn’t been a problem for him the previous night at a huge gathering.  

He doesn’t keep shabbat, and I guess that he googled me, found out my college graduation date, and lost interest. 

I feel completely devastated to have gone from being the object of someone’s rapt attention for 5 hours to being ignored completely.

This happened to me once before:  on Purim, a guy 7 years younger chatted me up, and attached himself to me.  I didn’t like him so much, but figured I would give him a chance, and we spoke for 10 minutes until he found out my age.  He flinched, spent 5 minutes in awkward conversation as if to prove that he wasn’t running away from my age, and then ran away.  

This time was far worse:  from the 4+ hours of conversation, it was clear that we liked each other well enough for several dates, if not a relationship or more, and I lost this for my age, and for no other reason.

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