"Not So Bad"

Your wife insisted you didn’t have the full story. She argued that you just hadn’t spent as much time around him as she had. Those little meetings in the backyard added up to a fairly substantial amount of time spent together. While she had initially been as bearish on him as you were, her opinion had flipped with time. She claimed that, actually, he was much more charming and polite then he’d appear at first blush.

“Okay, you’re right. He was really rude the first time we met him. That thing with the kiss was, like, kinda scary. But, whenever we talked outside he was actually really nice. Like he’d still tease me a bit, but not in like…not in like a bad way.”

She smiled faintly, looking out through the back window. Despite the night’s darkness, there were some lights out. A nearby light, from his house, shone particularly bright.

“Did you know that he actually has a really, really big collection of old movies? Like, film reels and stuff. He just doesn't really talk about it with a lot of people, because they’d think it’s just him being weird.”

“He must have thousands down there! Actually thousands! He also has this home theater kinda setup in the basement. It must have cost him, like, a fortune. I don’t know if old movies like that are really all that interesting to me, but it was still really cool. He’s kinda a geek too in his own way, hehe.”

“I wanted to watch some of his movies down there with him, one time. But, er, I got a little worried you wouldn’t really like that. Since I know you don’t like him all that much…”

You shifted uncomfortably. The version of him that she spoke of didn’t actually sound so bad. In her telling, his swaggering, {if Male = true}cocksure{endif}{if Female = true}misogynistic{endif} persona was something he had learned to use in public. Deep down though, he was a **** and dorkier person.

Could she be right? Had you snap judged him as an asshole without really understanding him? Or was she buying a lie that he was trying to sell her?