The Shoe Date

So back before I met Jonathan, I was in a singles ward. And the leadership thought it would be a good idea to encourage dating, so they devised the idea of a shoe date. All the ladies in the ward who wanted to participate contributed a shoe. All the men who wanted to participate came and chose a shoe, and then were told to whom the shoe belonged. The idea was that the man would return the shoe and ask its owner on a date. So around February, I put my shoe into the pile with everyone else's and it was duly selected.

Everyone else in the ward began going on their shoe dates. The bishop would remind us every Sunday that people needed to go on their dates. As weeks turned into months, my shoe was not returned. Finally when the semester was two weeks away from ending, I decided that not being asked out was one thing, but having half of my favorite pair of shoes stolen was another. Our ward was the same as our apartment complex, so I recruited my roommates to go try to recover my shoe. They went and knocked on the doors of all the men in our ward. Eventually they found somebody who had seen my shoe in his roommate's room.

With my shoe recovered and the identity of my would-be date revealed, I decided I had to know why he had never asked me out, and also what he had planned on doing with my shoe. So once again I sent my roommates (cowardly, I know). They came back with the report that he had chosen my shoe because it was very cute, and once he found out it belonged to me, his plan was just to hold onto the shoe indefinitely because he couldn't return it without asking me out. Ouch. But hey, at least my shoes are cute.