THE GABBLER

October 21st, 2013
What’s Your Number?

A What’s Your Number Story of Heartbreak

The following diary entry details the tragic broken engagement of a young couple, Tom and Holly. They had been madly in love until Holly dared to ask the one question that no woman really wants to know the answer to: what’s your number?

 

Dear Diary,

I never thought that I would write these words, but, it’s over. Tom and I ended things last night. Well, I suppose I ended things. I handed over the beautiful engagement ring he had given me only last week. It was the right thing to do and he needs it much more than I do.

It was just supposed to be standard post-engagement, pre-wedding banter. “What’s your number?” That silly question that you’re always too afraid to ask while you’re just dating. It seems too invasive and too unimportant and like there could never really be a right answer. Too high and you’re impulsive, thoughtless, free to the point of being reckless. Too low and you’re inexperienced in something that so defines our generation.

But now that we were engaged, I thought that maybe I could just ask him. His past was going to become my past and vice versa, so it just seemed fair. To know each other on that level. To go beyond our casual mentions of our different numbers in conversation.

My friends all told me I was crazy of course. “You can’t ask a man his number! It’s HIS NUMBER, you don’t want to know about that!” But I didn’t listen.

So last night I just asked him. I screwed my courage to the sticking place, or whatever it is, and I asked, “Tom, what’s your number?” And he told me.

I never imagined it would be so high. I mean, I knew it wasn’t low, we were together for almost two years before we got engaged, so we had talked about it but I never thought it would be that bad.

When he told me, I was disgusted, to be honest. To fall in love with someone, to sleep next to him every night and not know his number was SO high. I had let those hands, those hands that just seemed so dirty now, touch me. I tried to hold it in, but I just couldn’t. I ran to the bathroom and I threw up the dinner he had lovingly cooked for me.

To be honest, though. I had always suspected. It took him five years to graduate college, which meant he had a whole extra year to get that number up so high. And he had spent TWO semesters studying abroad in Europe, which is just a red flag for promiscuity, really.

But still. I had never expected it to be this bad. What was his number? 220,000.

That’s right. $220,000 of student loan debt. It was financial promiscuity taken to an extreme I barely understood.

I mean, I knew his family didn’t have much money and that he had gone to Wake Forest without any scholarships, but I never imagined. He still had at least twenty years left in his debt repayment plan, since he couldn’t make the necessary payments to finish up in ten years.

When he told me the air went out of the room, and our future with it. I saw the down payment on our future house disappear, I saw the number of children we could support halved, I saw the retirement savings we would only be able to start saving for after twenty years of student loan debt repayment. All of it, eaten up by the interest on the loans his 18-year-old self decided to take out because he just HAD to have the best education money could buy. Even if he didn’t have the money to buy it with.

I’m devastated, I really am. I loved him. But I can’t take on the burden of $225,000 in loans. I can’t sacrifice my future to the interest rates on his debt. I know that, one day, I’ll move on. To somebody who went to a state school, hopefully.

 

Yours,

Holly

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