So yesterday I get this telephone call from a JW sister. Let's call her Sister Naive. I knew Sister Naive when she was a teenager, knew her ex-husband when he and I were growing up in the congo. Sister Naive is in her early/mid-30s. Sister Naive calls me to "encourage" me. (I had ignored her previous voice mail a few weeks ago). We know what that means...Sister Naive is prying her nosy self into my business (that and she is bored because she only works a PT grocery job and auxiliary pioneering instead of using her degree to get a FT job. ..She got especially nosy when I informed her I was now engaged.... Sister Naive claimed not to know.... of course, her human part of her mind is in conflict with her JW-cult part of her mind......
On the one hand, Sister Naive claimed to be "happy" for me; on the other, I was not marrying in the Truth™. We talked about 15 minutes and I was polite but otherwise non-committal. I wasn't hiding anything, neither was I in a sharing kind of mood. We had a general chat, I let her get her "encouragement" off her mind, and figured that would be the last I heard from her. No such luck.
Sister Naive calls me back again this morning. She just "had to say something." That something was how much it bothered her that I was marrying a "Worldly™" girl instead of a JW. I reminded her, again, that I had not been to a KH for 2 years. (Her response the day before was "I am very sorry to hear that.") Today, she was very judgemental as the JW-cult infected part of her mind kicked back in and she had 24 hours to mull over the previous day's telephone conversation. I asked her if it would have been fair to a JW gal (that was interested in me back in 2006 after my break up and right before I started my fade) for me to accept her offer to date when I was not a "strong JW elder" anymore. She agreed but stated I should come back and get Spiritually Strong™ again. I threw it back in her face by reminding her that she married a JW brother that turned out to be a ghetto thug who cheated on her and left her with 2 kids to raise on her own. Snap. I wasn't rude, just wasn't taking her insulting my fiancee. I ended that conversation pretty quick (within 2 minutes) after her "Worldly™" comment.
Forward to this evening. My fiancee was at the house and we were sharing the events of the day. We hide nothing from each other. A) I have no reason to hide anything and B) she can always tell if something is bothering me. Same for me when it comes to her. So I tell her about today's second phone call. I could tell a sudden shift in mood and body language. Of course, my beautiful fiancee was offended....she knows the implications of being called Worldly™ by a JW. It is an insult, and not a very well-veiled one at that. It took over an hour of discussion to get past this incident. She thought I should have responded more directly to the insult. She also realized that I handle things a bit differently. I did defend my gal's honor by throwing crap back into Sister Naive's face and ending the conversation quickly.
At one point, my fiancee suggested I change my home phone number. I am not going to do this for a couple of reasons. I have had this number for 12 years, my parents had this number for at least a decade before that. I do not get a lot of robocalls from telemarketers or bill collectors because I have what is known as a "clean number"...(a number that has not been issued by the phone company to anyone else). If I changed numbers, I would get whatever crap calls that the previous owner(s) were getting.
More importantly, my fiancee always talks about not letting the JWs control my life yet, wouldn't changing my phone number be allowing just that? Thankfully, my fiancee is a reasonable woman and seen the logic of that. I promised her that I would react in a stronger, more direct manner the next time any JW made such a comment to me.
Maybe I shouldn't have shared the phone conversation with my fiancee. But why should I hide (as if I could) anything from her? We share everything, it's how we find out what bothers the other person...LOL I digress.....Our evening ended on a much better note after we talked it out, but really, why is it that Jehovah's Witnesses do not have any concept of personal boundaries? Why is it that JWs (including myself when I was a dub, as my fiancee pointed out) feel that they can say whatever they wish?
BTW, my fiancee and her son are moving into my house this weekend. I told her that she should answer the door in a robe if they ever knock on our door. I won't repeat what she said in response; let's just say that she is even more twisted in her ideas than I. LOL
Snakes (Rich )