The Best/Worst Comeback of All Time

A tragically satisfying resolution to an egregious assumption from The Man Who Thinks He Knows Best, and a welcome to Unassuming

We’re sitting at the bar of our favorite Park Slope Mexican restaurant, sipping $5 mango margaritas, when the man in the starched button down approaches awkwardly.

“Excuse me,” he says with a throat-clearing noise. “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. Are you two engaged?”

I cast a quick look to my boyfriend, who will in fact become my husband a few years in the future, and smile, telling the stranger, “Oh no, not yet. We’re just talking about weddings.”

My now-husband, Tim, and I had known we’d be getting married long before we were officially engaged, and we’d been chatting about where we could host a wedding, what kind of music we’d play — all the fun stuff you can daydream about before the realities of a budget and a guest list and choosing bridesmaids dresses that everyone is happy about set in.

The man nods in acknowledgement. Then he places his hand on Tim’s shoulder for a moment and says stiffly and with all seriousness, “Well, I hope you ask her father’s permission before you propose.”

I put down my drink and stare hard at the polished wooden bar. Tim freezes, then looks at me, realizes that I cannot bring myself to respond, and says to the man, “Her father is dead.”

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I tell you what, there are not many advantages to having a dead dad. And watching this presumptuous blowhard turn red and get flustered and mutter an apology and promptly leave the restaurant (without even paying for our drinks, which would not have made up for it but would have been a halfway decent gesture) did not erase the pain he caused me, and Tim, in that moment. My dad died suddenly when I was 20 years old, and that conversation took place only a few years later. It had been the first time I could remember talking about a Big Life Event without my excitement being eclipsed by the devastation that my dad wouldn’t be there. And here comes Mr. PatriarchyIsTheWay preaching his gospel of treating women like property and assuming every person has a living, present, loving father, shattering my hard-earned happy moment.

It wasn’t worth it, obviously, to see this man so thoroughly shamed. But I like to imagine that this encounter really changed him. Perhaps he went home and said to his reflection, “Hey buddy, that’ll teach you to impose your outdated and condescending views about heteronormativity and marriage onto complete strangers, or anyone for that matter!” Maybe he never ever made an unfounded assumption about another living soul and became the most open-minded and compassionate person in all of Brooklyn.

I tend to think this dude got off easy, quite frankly. Reminders of my dad were painful because of how much I loved and missed him. What if my dad had been a horrible abusive asshole? What if I never knew him at all? What if I had two moms, or a wonderful stepdad, or two dead parents? To be clear, had my dad been alive, Tim and I would have been just as insulted by this imposition. Tim probably would have talked to my dad before he proposed to me (just as he would do with my mom), not to seek a permission that only I could grant, but to tell him how excited he was to marry me, and invite him to the surprise celebratory brunch the next day in the city. It would have been really nice.

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We all move through the world under certain assumptions — many of them are necessary to function. We assume we will live to see the end of the day we start. We assume that traffic will flow in the right direction and the sun won’t fall out of the sky and that Law & Order: SVU will never be cancelled.

We also make plenty of damaging assumptions, the worst of which lead to prejudice and racism, and even the not-so-bad can lead to heartbreak, lost opportunity, missed chances to understand each other on a meaningful level.

This newsletter will feature essays, interviews, sometimes reviews or recommendations, orbiting the theme of undoing our assumptions. Un-assuming.

I’ll also talk about moments and things that may not seem spectacular or important upon first consideration. But I believe it’s possible to find meaning even in the most dull and dark corners of our experiences. Not in a “Everything happens for a reason” kind of way. (If you can find it on a sign at Marshall’s, I don’t want to hear it.) In a way that requires introspection and sometimes hard emotional work. It can be done. I hope that by sharing the meaning I find in my own unassuming moments, it can inspire you to think about yours.

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This is the first newsletter post, and I plan to send new ones about every two weeks. I hope you subscribe! It’s completely free for now, and if I ever create a paid version, there will still be a free version available.