Picture this: It’s a Valentines family restaurant or your fave all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. You’ve paid your $39.95 and there it is, all the food you can possibly want on platters and in warming dishes, when some primal switch goes off that triggers the thought, “I must eat my weight in food!”
This is followed by, “What if someone else takes all the roast ham?” then quickly chased by, “I’m going to start with chocolate cake and jelly beans.”
I try to restrain myself at a buffet. I feel the panic, but I wait. For my first trip up, I take a bread roll. But I see what they’re doing there, putting the filler carbs at the start. I put the bread roll back.
Only because I don’t want to look like a walking ad for bad food habits, I take a wee serve of a salad-type thing, then with restraint, I add meat, creamy potato gloop and lots of sauces. On my second trip, I take more gloop, another slice of ham and, what the hell, a roast potato or three.
Then it’s time for dessert – or “afters”, as Dad always called the sweet course – and though I’m full of gloop, I’m despo for trifle, anything chocolate and a macaroon. Bad idea. I feel sick and I want to vomit.
And so it goes with men.
Everyone deserves a second chance. We are a society of walking second chances. Without second chances, most of us would have never finished school, had a relationship with our parents or kept a job beyond week one.
However, I firmly believe, through multiple trials and errors (yep, I’m a slow learner), that a third chance – or a third trip to the man buffet – is going to end up making you feel sick and wanting to vomit.
And by vomit, I mean a really long, arduous case of “gastro-man-teritis”. I think LeAnn Rimes aptly expressed it in a song a decade or two ago: “Shame on you if you fool me once. Shame on me if you fool me twice.”
Oh, I know you’ve paid for that man with time and love, and you don’t want to have to start from scratch. I understand that people change, but I strongly advise that if you have had your fill after two trips to the buffet, then you put your heart down and you move away from the buffet table.
Third helpings are a huge mistake at a family restaurant – and an even bigger error at Heartbreak Hotel. Walk away. You’ve had your $39.95’s worth. Keep walking, my friend!
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