Post 37: The Ice Cream Test

originally created as Column Thirty-seven, October, 2003



The Ice Cream Test

We had 20 minutes to kill before the movie and there was no place to grab a coffee, so my date and I entered the ice cream parlor on the floor above the movie theater. I wasn’t particularly in the mood for ice cream but there wasn’t much choice unless we wanted to stroll around the popular drug-store franchise. It was my second date with Aaron and already I knew that we had a lot in common: Both divorced with children, both working in hi-tech, both from English speaking countries with no parents in Israel and both of us liking the tv show “Sex and the City”.

The ice cream bar featured numerous flavors and then came the shock. He ordered two scoops of chocolate ice cream. I stood astonished as he chose the chocolate among the multitude of flavors ranging from lemon sherbet and strawberry cheesecake to poppyseed and pistachio. He looked at me, explaining “I know that vanilla is the most popular flavor around the world, but I like chocolate.” We sat down with our ice cream (I decided that I needed a sugar fix at this point to recover from my shock, and ordered one scoop of lemon sherbet). I leaned over the table and whispered quietly to him “I’ve heard of people like you. I just didn’t know they actually existed.” Then I realized that I might have hurt his feelings by insinuating that he was “common”, and I thought more deeply about the subject. If he had so many choices and chose chocolate, then maybe this was actually a good sign. Maybe this was a sign of knowing what he wants and sticking to it. Of faithfulness. Of devotion. A man who could be surrounded by diverse and plentiful flavours of ice cream and yet still stick to his favourite might do the same regarding women. Say he's at a business conference in Europe, surrounded by a multitude of women of varying heights, ages and figures, wearing different colored clothes, and speaking different languages, he would resist the temptation to try any of the options available. So therefore, who needs a private detective?

To the woman wanting to know if your potential boyfriend is a Don Juan or a one-woman man, this writer says: Simply take him out for ice cream.