I actually liked Long Island Grad Student (!)

The day after I wrote my irritated post on Nov. 7th wondering why my eHarmony guys (http://www.eharmony.com/) only seemed to want to be penpals, both Long Island Grad Student AND New Jersey Journalist got back to me with concrete plans to meet! The moral: complaining affects the universe??

So, at a coffee shop yesterday I met Long Island Grad Student, who’s 32 and getting his master’s in public health. Very nice, smart, funny, a good listener. He has moved around a bit: Pittsburgh, Vermont, even Buffalo, where my mom grew up and where I still have relatives. On everyone’s eHarmony profile, there’s a part at the end that says, “Is there anything else you’d like your potential dates to know?” or something like that. That’s where I wrote that I’m interested in adopting a child one day. (It’s also where I put “no Republicans, please!”)

As we talked yesterday, LI Grad Student said, “I think I mentioned this to you in an e-mail, but I really liked what you wrote in your profile about wanting to adopt a child someday,” and he asked me why I wanted to. I explained that I’ve just always known, ever since I was a teenager, that I’m supposed to adopt older kids. “It’s almost like a calling,” I added. I was just wondering if the term “calling” had sounded too pretentious when he surprised me by saying, “Me, too. Especially with all the overpopulation in the world, I’ve always thought, why make a kid when there are so many already here who need parents? Ever since elementary school, I’ve thought about it.”

I was shocked. I told him how guys in general don’t seem as open to the idea of adoption as women. I’ve read a lot of personal stories by women who have adopted, and in many cases the husbands were really not too enthused at first and had to be convinced. “Men seem to want to spread their seed,” I said.

LI Grad Student laughed and said, "Well, I have to admit, in the past couple of years I’ve thought it might be nice to have one biological kid. But I do still want to adopt.” He said a good friend and his wife adopted three kids from Colombia at the ages of three, four, and six, and she got unexpectedly pregnant one year later (!). So it was a real instant family, but it's all working out well for them.

We drank hot chocolate and talked for about an hour and a half. Then he had to go because he’d promised he’d get back to LI in time to watch the football game with his dad. As we walked out of the coffee shop, he said he’d had a good time and asked shyly. “Could I call you sometime?” I said yes, and we were saying our goodbyes when he got a strange look on his face and said. “I think I’m going to totally embarrass myself right now, but I have to ask you a question.”

“What?” I couldn’t imagine what he was going to say.

He lowered his voice and said, “If I turn around, can you tell me if my pants have split?” He turned around, and sure enough, his pants had TOTALLY split, right across the butt – I could see his underwear! I tried not to laugh as I explained the situation and asked, “Do you feel a draft?”

“Oh, big time.”

“It’s too bad you didn’t bring a jacket,” I said.

“Or an extra set of pants,” he sighed. ;) But at least he’d driven in, so he could just slide into his car and drive home rather than stand on a subway or a Long Island Rail Road train with no way to disguise it!