The empty bottle test

Let me tell you a very wonderful story;

“There was this handsome young man who developed interest in a beautiful young lady in the university he attended. He had been friends with this lady since their Junior High School days, but it was until they got to the same university that he developed a strong affection for the lady and wanted her to be his girlfriend in the hope that they would marry in the future. Being a shy guy he tried every means to make his intentions known to the lady, but he was always lost for words when it came to the very crucial moment. He resorted to subtleties in the hope that the beautiful lady would get wind of his intentions and make things easy for him to propose. He would call the lady every morning and evening to check on her, any time he got the slightest chance he would race to the hostel of the lady to check on her as well, he bought her gifts and would pounce on the slightest chance to do something for her just to impress her. Luckily for the young man, the lady got impressed with the attention and the care he was showing her. She too started developing interest in him.

One day the young man as usual went to visit the lady. The lady played with an empty bottle of Tampico drink she had finished drinking while they were talking. After some time her roommate called her to show her something in the corridor. She casually passed the empty bottle to the guy and raced to the corridor to talk with her roommate, politely excusing herself. The young man thinking the empty bottle wasn’t anything important to hold on to for her put it on the ground and left it there. After some minutes the young lady came back from the corridor and sat on her chair beside the young man. She took a quick glance at the bottle on the ground but didn’t say anything. The young man caught the lady’s glance and felt he had done wrong by not holding on to the empty bottle for her but yet again he felt it was too late to pick it up and moreover of what use was an empty bottle.

A few days later, the young man gathered courage and proposed to the lady when he took her out. To his surprise, the young lady rejected his proposal flatly. Her excuse was that he failed her test, and what was the test- it was the empty Tampico bottle he failed to hold on to for her. If you cannot hold on to just an empty bottle, for me, then you cannot hold on to me. If you cannot indulge my trivialities, then you cannot indulge my wholeness- she said. The shock on the guy’s face knew no bounds. He passed all but failed the empty bottle test and that proved his undoing. He felt really hard done by the lady.”

Your thought is as good as mine after reading this story. How could the lady use the empty bottle test as the only yardstick to judge the entirety of the young man’s chivalry and love for her? Did the other things he did for her not matter?

Many times we also do the same thing the young lady in the story did. We use a slim yardstick to judge the entirety of a person’s being. If what this young lady did was wrong then we are also always wrong to judge people that way. It is important to get to know people and try to get to understand them before you form an opinion about them. You cannot like everyone and you don’t have to hate anyone as well – we are all human after all.