A few weeks ago I went for Happy Hour with a friend I used to work with. She'd just broken up with her boyfriend and was still smarting from the events leading up to the end, and I wanted to hear all about it.
I remember when they had first started seeing each other. She told me about their first few dates as we hustled stocking racks and racks of newly-baked bread onto shelves early one morning and she was still feeling both scared and exhilarated, as many people are during the early stages of any relationship. None of her previous ones had really worked out well for her, and she was afraid it would be the same this time around again.
"Don't agonize over it," I kept saying. "This is the time you simply enjoy the ride and have fun." Almost every relationship often goes through the same trajectory: at first it simply soars upwards while the couple is still giddy over the newness of each other. Then it hits a few bumps when issues arise and then it dawdles a bit, sometimes even loses a bit of momentum. If the couple decides it's worth the work, they give it another strong push and off it goes again. Eventually, hopefully, it hits its stride and moves along at a steady pace, occasionally interrupted by bumps and stops and thrusts and jumps. But the beginning is always the stuff love songs and poems are made of, and should be enjoyed to the hilt.
Not that I always thought so myself. I was just talking to another girlfriend this morning, someone I haven't seen in more than a decade. She had just exchanged email messages with this guy I once had a short-lived relationship with a long time ago and she was telling me all about it. "Why did it end again?" she asked out of the blue.
"Eh, it didn't last too long anyway," I said dismissively.
"Yeah, I remember that," she replied. "But it seemed really intense while it lasted. You guys used to make me sick."
"I don't know about that," I quickly disagreed. "There were always so many girls in his life, you know. I thought I was just another."
"Nope," she said. "He used to tell me that he loved you. I told him he was joking because he never talked like that about anyone, but he said he really did."
"I never knew that," I said quietly, and then added,"Bastard cheated on me, remember? So I dumped him quick."
"Yeah," she said. Then after a slight pause: "But I also remember something was wrong, he said. You got cold, it was like you weren't in it all the way."
"I wasn't," I admitted. "I decided to be really careful because I didn't want to get hurt. I knew there were always girls in and out of his life so I guess I was always just waiting for the other shoe to drop."
And so it did.
first time i've come across "waiting for the other shoe to drop"...
Posted by: Baba | July 24, 2008 at 04:51 AM
I'm trying to remember the origin of the idiom. I think it came from this funny anecdote from long ago about people living in apartments with thin floors/walls. Anyway, guy upstairs gets home and was being loud moving about. He pulls off one shoe and drops it on the floor. Then he takes off the other shoe and because he realizes his neighbor downstairs might be awakened, he puts it down gently and quietly.
Meanwhile, downstairs, his neighbor has already heard the first shoe drop and is awake. But he doesn't hear the other, so he finds himself waiting for it. Then he yells to his neighbor upstairs: "Drop the other shoe already!"
So basically it means waiting for something to happen based on past circumstances. Sometimes it's also interpreted as waiting for something bad to (inevitably) occur.
Posted by: Gigi | July 31, 2008 at 10:44 PM