I'm writing you this letter to explain why I refuse to see you anymore, even though I know you don't really care why and won't use the information in any useful way. Maybe it's just because I need to let this out and make it kind of public. I'm also sending you a letter because I know it will irritate you that I used such an anachronistic and "romanticist" method of communication.
First, let me admit that I am disappointed that things turned out this way. When our friends introduced us, I was hopeful that I'd found somebody I could relate to intellectually, who could push me when I needed to be pushed to understand my world. But, I also wanted to do some pushing of my own. Nobody has a perfect, complete understanding of everything. In your case, though, anything you didn't fully understand, or could make people believe you fully understand, is "trivial", "unimportant", even a simple waste of your vast brain power to consider for a moment. It became very difficult to have those conversations where all the facts are supposed to come from your side of the table and all the doubts and drivel from mine. And when in fact it didn't go that way, we come to my next problem.
That is, that you would abruptly change the subject if it seemed like I had any actual knowledge and informed opinions of the topic, and go into banal family problems. Since I never met your family, and their living on the other side of the country made a chance encounter unlikely, I can only interpret this as your distraction from an engaged intellectual discussion into a soft, fluffy chat that would be more appropriate for a lady such as myself. Naturally, I never asked you for this deference to my fragile, feminine brain. You took it upon yourself to provide it with no prior consultation whatsoever.
The third matter is, perhaps, merely a mutation of the second. You seemed to believe that everyone in your life must necessarily be fascinating to everybody else, and on more than one occasion our conversation was hijacked by one of your old classmates or neighbors or bosses, often with the thinnest of connections to the statement previous to the derailing of the conversational train of thought. Why should I care to know the life stories of people who I have never met, will never meet, and will never really want to? Finally, why such insistence on regaling me with these stories over and over again? And even worse, continuing every story to its conclusion after I had made it clear that I was more familiar than necessary with said story?
To conclude, "John", it is a shame that we must allow our ways to part thus. But I'll be goddammed before I let any smug sonofabitch bellyflop into some professorial mentor position in my life without any consideration for my own intellectual offerings.
Janet
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