Okay this is not my horrific story but it is my girlfriend Kate’s. Kate was seeing this guy for a year. He seemed like perfect marriage material. He was tall, handsome, kind and good in bed. Even better yet, he has a job as a researcher that pays him about seven thousand a year. Kate by the way is an assistant to a mortgage broker and only makes about thirty five thousand a year.
So it turns out that his mom gets sick and that they have to go down to San Diego to visit her. El Cheapo, as he is now known, has a very nice SUV but it turns out he doesn’t want to take it on the road around the gulf as he fears it might be damaged. Instead he encourages my friend to take her cheap Honda instead. This way he doesn’t have to pay for insurance and all the rest.
His mother lives in a one-bedroom condo in the middle of town in a development that is not too pretty. Even though his mom’s two sisters were already staying there he insisted that he and Kate stay there too to save money. The result was an aching back from sleeping on the iron bars that you can fell all night when you sleep on a fold out couch. All night she was longing to be in a hotel, any hotel, even a Holiday Inn. Furthermore the two old ladies that were in the bedroom would not stop snoring.
All night Kate kept thinking, “Well maybe that real engagement ring he has been promising me is not on the way. “ Instead of proposing with a diamond ring he bought her a zircon that would do in the time being.
The next morning El Cheapo and Kate had toast and coffee and then spent all day at the hospital where his mother was fine. Kate bought his mother a big bouquet of flowers, a teddy bear and some candied fruits that she could enjoy later. She also bought his mom a housecoat so she would not feel embarrassed walking down the hall with the rear flaps of the hospital gown flapping open. Then Kate suggested that they go get something to eat.
Kate suggests celebrating the success of his mom’s operations by eating somewhere five star and really good like Benihani’s but instead he takes her to a really cheap pub down by the wharf where they have watery corn chowder and hamburgers with buns that taste like cardboard. When the bill comes he takes a look at and when he sees that it comes to a grand total of sixteen dollars plus tip he says to her (quite seriously) – “We’ve got to stop going to such expensive restaurants.”
Needless to say the two of them broke up for good shortly after that episode. The moral of the story is – always go for the diamond in the rough and don’t settle for a cheap Zircon.