I’ve been dating my boyfriend Dave for a little over four years. The relationship has been pretty smooth. I feel like we are very compatible, and he makes me feel like he agrees. We don’t live together, but when he isn’t traveling for work, we spend most of our time together.
This seems silly, but I’ve noticed a pattern of Dave being unusually good at a lot of things that he’s never given any hint of. I remember three or four months into our relationship when he decided to do some card tricks at a mutual friend’s party. These weren’t just any card tricks, though. He had everyone spellbound with his patter, and I swear people’s jaws were falling open as he finished each trick. OK, everyone has some dumb tricks or whatever that they like to pull out and show off. Whatever.
Maybe six months after that, we were in the city and there was an old-school breakdancing crew set up on a corner, and we stopped to watch. Dave started talking to a couple of them, and pointed at the mat, and they bumped fists, and Dave jumps into the middle of the mat and starts dancing. Dave looks like an accountant. He has short blonde hair, and big glasses, and he was wearing khakis and a button-down shirt. I was mortified, because he looked ridiculous switching his feet around out there. All of a sudden he does a complete forward flip, and he’s like a flurry of feet and windmills and he even got in a head spin. This is a 37-year-old white guy, and the crowd of 20-something dudes is losing it’s mind while he’s dancing. What the fuck?? It took fifteen minutes to get out of there through all the slaps on the back and fist bumps. I asked him where he learned to do that, and he said he picked it up watching movies. What?
About eighteen months into our relationship, we visited a family friend of mine named Dean. Dean is a big gun nut, and he’s turned a section of his property out in the country into some sort of training ground. He has dozens of targets that swing around on arms, or flip over when you shoot them. He also has two long lanes divided by hay bales for shooting rifles. Dean demonstrated the training area while we watched, and invited Dave to have a go. Dave said no, but Dean asked a few more times, and Dave finally agreed. Dave started the course with one full (clip? magazine?) in his gun, and another in his belt. Dean blew a whistle, and Dave WENT OFF on those targets. It was all bang, bang, duck, turn, bang, move, bang, bang, bang. He was so fast.
I don’t remember the actual number, but he did the course in something like 20 seconds, and that must have been a good time, because Dean was floored. I never even saw Dave reload he was moving so fast, but the bullets in his belt weren’t there when he came out the other side. I guess Dave was pretty good on the rifle range, too. Dean talked about both all night. When I asked Dave about it, he told me he’d had an uncle who was really into guns and I guess the uncle taught him.
Last year, we were out at a new bar and they had karaoke. I kept poking fun at him, telling him to go sing me a song, and he kept smiling and refusing. I was a little bit buzzed, and I got kind of pouty because I really did want him to sing me a song. So, he did. He put in a song, and when it was his turn to sing HE WAS UNBELIEVABLE. He sang a country ballad, and my heart melted. Probably a dozen people stopped him on his way back to our table to tell him how good he was. After that, he put in three more songs, and he was amazing every single time. He sang Tom Jones, a song from Phantom of the Opera, and BJ Thomas, and he killed every one of them. We had been together THREE YEARS at that point, and I had never heard him sing a single note except joking around and singing maybe part of a television theme song. He could absolutely be singing on Broadway or something. I actually got a little jealous after what seemed like a hundred people stopped by to shake his hand and compliment him, and at least six women came by to ask him to sing duets with them.
Dave travels often for work. It’s not constant, but it probably adds up to 8-12 weeks per year, in chunks of anywhere from two weeks to two months at a time. I think 2017 was the worst year, and he was on the road > 16 weeks that year. The travel bothered me a bit at first, but I adjusted. Maybe six months ago, we were both traveling at the same time, so we went to the airport together. We were at a lounge in the airport, and this group of guys in business attire were talking politics loudly enough for us to hear them. They were going on about something that had happened in Syria, and Dave was listening in and frowning. Dave finally butted in, which I have never seen him do, and started explaining why they were wrong about what they were saying. They argued with him, and Dave basically gave a thirty-minute lecture about politics in the middle east. He had facts, and figures, and an answer for everything those guys said. At one point, one of the guys in the group who had a mild accent said, “THANK you,” and gestured at the other guys like he was saying “I tried to tell them.”
Dave almost never talks politics. Beyond watching the news, I’ve never seen him show a particular interest in global affairs. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about in the airport, and everything I was able to remember and look up later checked out. Where is he finding the time to learn all this stuff? How come he doesn’t talk to me about it? I would love to learn from someone who seems to know what he’s talking about.
The most recent thing happened about two weeks ago. We went to a restaurant at the suggestion of a friend who knows the owner. Before we were seated, our friend brings the owner out to meet us. The owner introduces himself, then Dave introduces himself, and says something that confused me. It sounded like nonsense, and I thought I had misheard him. I look over, and see the owner looking surprised, then the owner says something back to Dave, and then the two of them are off on a five-minute conversation in another language, which I later learned was Tamil. The owner brought his wife and daughter over, and everyone seemed very happy to speak to my boyfriend in their own language. What the hell is going on there? We’re four years into an intimate relationship, and he has never ever not once mentioned knowing another language.
I know this is really dumb, but it’s starting to bother me. It feels like he is intentionally not sharing things with me. You can’t just accidentally not mention that you speak another language for four years. I don’t speak Tamil (I didn’t even know there was a language called Tamil), but he sure seemed to be fluent. He has to be practicing, right? This isn’t something he picked up in high school twenty-five years ago and somehow still remembers. Why did I not find out about this until he’s suddenly holding court in some restaurant?
The magic, whatever. The breakdancing: weird, but it’s not like breakdancing comes up a lot in conversation. Maybe he just never had a chance to wedge in that he was a talented street performer. The guns? A little bit scary, to be honest. The karaoke bothers me, because I would love to have a boyfriend who sings to me. He has a beautiful voice. He could have been singing love songs to me for four years. The language thing is honestly a little creepy, because there’s just no way he speaks another language at a high level, and simply never mentioned it. That one really feels like something he kept from me, but if he was keeping it from me on purpose, why use it in front of me?
I feel so dumb even saying this, but I feel like I’m dating a slightly nerdy Jason Bourne. Dave makes a lot of jokes about his “government paycheck,” and being a civil servant, but I don’t actually have a clear idea exactly which branch of the government he works for. He says his job is “logistics” whenever someone asks. It somehow never struck me as odd that I know so little about his work, because he treated it so naturally. I’m sure my boyfriend isn’t a superspy or anything, but I am starting to think he does something sort of secretive.
I really want to push him on this, and find out what’s going on, but I don’t want to come off as overbearing or untrusting. These incidents are the highlights off the top of my head, but the relationship has been full of smaller surprises that seem to add up to my boyfriend keeping things from me, and it hurts. Am I being crazy here? I know you can never really know everything about another person, but where’s the line? Shouldn’t I know that he can sing and speak multiple languages? If he’s so into middle eastern politics, isn’t it reasonable for me to think he would have discussed them with me at some point? I just don’t want to feel like there’s a ton of stuff he’s intentionally not telling me.
tl;dr: My boyfriend breakdances, speaks languages I didn’t know he spoke, sings like an angel, and is some sort of weapons expert, and I never know about any of it until he does something in front of me that lets it slip.
Submitted November 26, 2019 at 08:36PM by MillieNineToes https://ift.tt/2rpkfP3
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