A Critical Look At A Relationship – The Bank Teller
When doing research for these articles I noticed that nowhere was a relationship dissected, from start to finish, for others to see the advice put into action. I have chosen seven of my relationships to dissect in hopes that you will gain from my successes and learn from my failures. This article is part 3 of 7.
Relationship length: Three months
Japanese spoken: English only
Length of time in Japan before First Date: About 3 1/2 years
The Pre-Meeting:
Let’s talk company uniforms. The bank I went to had the tellers dressed in a very classy uniform and the tellers were nice to look at. There was one teller who could speak English and was more comfortable working with me than the others so I tended to wait for her window to open.
The Meeting:
Across the street from the bank was a shopping mall with a food court. One day, while I stopped in for a quick bite to eat, I saw her eating lunch alone. I went over and asked if I could join her and she said yes.
We did the typical small talk. She mentioned that she usually eats lunch with the rest of the tellers in the lunchroom at the bank (never knew banks had lunchrooms) but she forgot to bring her lunch that day. I responded that if she ever forgets her lunch again, give me a call and I’ll come eat with her.
My statement was more of a “nice gesture”, didn’t expect a response, sort of statement, which made her response unexpected.
She said that she would love to have lunch again but the bank frowns on dating customers. I thought she was joking so I continued the joke by saying that I could always change banks. She said she thought that would make it OK to date.
At that point it dawned on me what she was saying and that I had, unknowingly, asked her on a lunch date. I figured what the hell and went with the flow.
The Relationship:
This relationship went rather slow, in terms of the physical, compared to other relationships I’ve had. She was also one of my more expensive relationships. She didn’t like being in my apartment (for sex or anything else) and she still lived at home so, when we wanted to do the deed, we would go to a love hotel.
She also had a lot of external negative pressures regarding our relationship. We would talk about how a couple of her friends and, in particular, her father objected to her dating me (i.e. dating a foreigner).
The End:
The majority of the pressure to break it off with me came from her father. He would constantly tell her she was not getting any younger and needed to find a “proper” husband (she was 29) and stop playing around. Her friends were saying pretty much the same thing. For some Japanese women there are just some cultural walls that cannot be overcome.
