On Telling Pop Rocks from Peanut Butter Cups

This is a story that I've thought about blogging several times since I started my blog, but I could never find a way to tell it that didn't sound self-defeating. Over Christmas break I dug it up and tried again, and I thought I found my angle. But I spent too much time revising, and it got too long, and I became too self-conscious about the college crush part of the story, and it's been languishing in my drafts for weeks. I haven't written anything here for a little while though, and while it might not be perfect, I already have it sitting here and I've been resting on this story for years - I might as well just get it out there. So in the spirit of Valentine's Day and BYU group dates and chocolate, here goes...

[Oh, and also I have a couple new books up on my book blog: Moneyball by Michael Lewis and Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.]

 When I was a BYU student my roommates and I would plan periodic group dates. We called them “friendship activities,” partly as a way to laugh at ourselves for falling into a BYU stereotype, and partly because we wanted to lower the pressure. Because in spite of ourselves, we felt a lot of pressure on these group dates. 
 

Many members of the church think of Provo (for better or for worse) as a mecca of Mormon dating. For a lot of students it is. Even having attended BYU myself, I’m still sometimes amazed at just how many married students I have in the classes I teach, and how young they are. But I didn’t really date much at BYU myself, and my roommates didn’t either. In fact, many of my friends didn’t. In retrospect I know that there was nothing wrong with us, but it didn’t do much for our self-esteem to never be asked out in a place where the stereotype is that everyone is married by 20. For a lot of us, it took leaving Provo to discover that we were indeed attractive and datable. 

I say this not to harp on my college-era dating woes, but to explain why these friendship activities were so laden with expectations. They were often the only dates some of us could expect to go on in the course of a semester, or even a year, and our only chance to try to convince the guys we saw at church or in class or at work that they might want to consider looking at us as more than just casual friends. It felt like our dating lives rested entirely on our own efforts, and that a group date was the only effort that really counted.

That said, I only rarely went on a group date with a guy I was really, truly, undeniably interested in dating, and the group date that kicks of this particular story was not one of those times, exactly. It was one of my last group dates before I graduated, and this particular time I’d been at a loss about who to invite. One of my roommates suggested someone from our family home evening group. Let’s call him Roger. I didn't dislike the idea of inviting Roger. He was smart and funny and cute-but-not-out-of-my-league attractive, and at the previous FHE activity he’d been sincerely and overwhelmingly complimentary about the blueberry cookie bars I’d made for dessert. Sincerely complimenting my baking is a big turn-on for me. I mustered my nerve. I asked Roger. He agreed. 

And unfortunately, the date went really well. 

Roger was friendly and seemed to enjoy being there. We had good group conversation, but he was appropriately attentive to me and I discovered that we had more in common than I’d guessed. We came from similar family backgrounds. We both loved Reese’s peanut butter cups. We were both avid readers and had read many of the same books as children and as adults. By the end of the evening, I was a little twitterpated and that surprised me. I went to bed trying not to feel excited, because excitement had always ended in disappointment for me. I didn’t want to build up my hopes only to have them dashed. But at the same time I kind of felt like maybe he had noticed me, too.

The next day was Saturday and when I went on my weekly trip to Smith’s for groceries I found that bags of miniature Reese’s peanut butter cups were on sale. Roger had spoken passionately about his love of Reese’s peanut butter cups on our date, but I was trying not to think about Roger and I walked purposefully on past the peanut butter cups. 

And then I had a Moment of Clarity. Right there in the candy aisle I realized that I had a self-defeating attitude. The date had gone well! And yet here I was already assuming that Roger would never so much as glance my way again. With that attitude I was bound to act accordingly: I’d be shy and standoffish. At FHE I would make a point of avoiding conversation and eye contact and any sign that I might actually like him, because I was pretty sure he’d think I was a crazy stalker girl if I did. And that would be the end of it, but not because of him. Because of me. 
 

Standing there in the middle of Smith’s, I needed to not let this be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was going to have confidence for once. The night before, I’d had every reason to believe that Roger and I could be friends at the very least, and quite possibly more than friends, and I needed to not assume it was all over before anything had started. I needed to believe in the possibility, something I was not accustomed to doing. And in that moment, believing in the possibility amounted to buying those Reese’s peanut butter cups. If I had the confidence to buy the peanut butter cups, I reasoned, then the universe would conspire to give me a reason and an opportunity to give him the peanut butter cups. It all felt like some great, wonderful experiment that could solve all my dating woes.

I bought the Reese’s peanut butter cups, and Roger started avoiding me. Sometimes I imagine slights that aren’t there, but I was 99.9% positive at the time and am 98.2% positive in retrospect that avoiding me is exactly what he was doing. I was determined not to play my shy, hard-to-get hand, but I am also not naturally overbearing. In church on Sunday I smiled at him and tried to strike up casual conversation, and he slipped away with an awkward excuse. He stopped coming to FHE. He stopped coming to institute. He certainly never called me. My roommates and I invited Roger and his roommates over to our apartment for games and his roommate came, but Roger did not. His roommate said he was studying. At church, Roger avoided eye contact.

Those peanut butter cups sat in my dresser drawer for a long time. I should have eaten them myself, but the thought depressed me. A couple months later I poured them into a candy dish and let my roommates dispose of them for me. 

I have actually seen Roger a couple times since then, in unexpected places. Both times I felt nothing of that brief crush, but since he was a familiar face I wanted to say hi and see what he’d been up to in the years since. Maybe I also wanted him to see that I didn’t really care about what had happened and that I wasn’t madly in love with him. The second part, at least, was true. 

The first time I saw him was at a BYU dance I didn’t want to be at two years later when I'd returned to Provo for a masters degree. I pointed him out to my friend Tana and told her the story, and she encouraged me to catch his attention. But when Roger saw me he seemed to weave away. He made an exit for the bathroom, and Tana and I positioned ourselves casually near the hall but he didn’t come back that direction; he took the long way around. I felt certain he did this to avoid me, and Tana assured me it was just my perception, but she admitted that it kind of looked that way.

The second time was, strangely, in the Hill Street Ward. I spent an entire Sunday school hour staring at the back of Roger's head (not continuously) and wondering if it was him. After Sunday School he stood up and looked at me long enough that I could confirm that it was him. He made a quick exit again. He didn’t come back to the ward. But I think he was only visiting, maybe from Ohio or Bloomfield Hills.

Those peanut butter cups continue to loom symbolically in my memory. To this day I will occasionally do something in the spirit of optimism, sometimes dating-related and often not. I will buy tickets to a show months in advance before I know who I’ll invite to come with me. I’ll purchase a small gift because it reminds me of a particular person and I imagine that buying the gift will create the opportunity to give it to him or to her in the future. I will take a step out into the dark with the expectation that the universe will reward my optimism with not letting me fall off a cliff. But often my first reaction to my burst of optimism is to think, “This is just another Peanut Butter Cup Moment.” And I remember the original peanut butter cup moment when trying to push aside thoughts of what I feared ended up leading to exactly what I had feared.

Once I found a Pop Rocks chocolate bar in a bin at the grocery store. A friend was celebrating his birthday that night and so, on a whim, I bought the chocolate bar to give him as a birthday gift. I didn’t know him all that well and I had no ulterior motives. Something just made me think that he would get a kick out of a Pop Rocks chocolate bar. Before the birthday celebration, I picked up the bar and wondered if I should tie a ribbon around it or make a little card, but I felt kind of embarrassed so I just stuck it in my coat pocket. When I got to the party I fingered the chocolate bar in my coat pocket and wondered how to give it to him without awkwardness, without him reading it as anything other than the token of casual friendship that it was. And suddenly I thought, “On no! This is another Peanut Butter Cup Moment!” and I never took the chocolate out of my pocket. I set it on a shelf in my closet when I went home that night. Later I tried it myself. It was as strange as you’d expect, and I didn’t finish the whole thing.

Much, much later I told this friend about the Pop Rocks candy bar (but not about the peanut butter cups). “I would have loved that!” he told me, and since I knew him much better by that point I knew he would have; at the time of his birthday I had just been guessing. As we had that conversation I regretted that I’d kept the candy bar in my pocket. The truth was, it had not been a Peanut Butter Cup Moment. I’d had nothing to prove to myself or to him with that Pop Rocks chocolate bar. Instead I’d had an instinct and was a good instinct and I hadn’t listened to it. 

Because I have a tendency to imbue objects and events with great symbolism, which they may or may not actually merit, the Pop Rocks chocolate bar has also become significant to me. But the significance of the Pop Rocks is something entirely different from the significance of the peanut butter cups. The problem with the Peanut Butter Cups (as a symbol) is that they represent my attempt to force the universe, or God, or another person to conform to my idea of what I thought should happen. I wasn’t buying them for Roger, I was buying them for me. There was nothing inherently wrong with my intentions; what was wrong was the significance I read into the fact that everything worked out exactly the way I did not want it to.

But the Pop Rocks chocolate bar was never for me. The Pop Rocks chocolate bar was, from the very beginning, for another person. It’s only when it became about me that everything fell through. I doubt anything earth-shattering would have happened if I had gotten up the nerve to take that candy bar out of my coat pocket. Probably I would have given my friend the candy bar, and he would have loved it, and later we would have become friends just as we did and I would have looked back at the Pop Rocks candy bar and thought, “Huh. Maybe I knew him better than I thought I did.” Which is exactly what happened anyway, except that he didn’t get to enjoy the candy bar.

Something I have learned and am still learning is that sometimes instincts are just instincts (like the Pop Rocks), but sometimes they’re promptings. Regardless, instincts to do good for someone else are the kind that should pretty much always be acted upon. But it’s never about me. It’s got to be about the other person. Sometimes I may reap the benefit of doing good for another person either because it strengthens my relationship with that person or simply because I get a good feeling from doing it. But sometimes I might not get either of those, and honestly, that's okay.