A One-Night Stand

I'm not really in a relationship. I'm merely pretending to be. A guy in my cohort wants to dissuade his mother from trying to fix him up with the daughter of her new neighbor, so he's having me pose as his fiance during dinner with his mother tonight. He even borrowed an engagement ring from another member of the cohort whose ex-fiance was roughly as underfed as I am, so the ring somewhat fits me.

It's dishonest, but I feel for the guy. He gets one lousy week off this spring, and he doesn't want to spend it trying to ditch the daughter of his mother's new neighbor. As I understand it, his mother is seeing the neighbor, and they both think it would be charming if my cohort mate and the neighbor's daughter  got together. What they don't seem to acknowledge is that, statistically speaking, even if my cohort mate and his mother's neighbor's (or mother's boyfriend's, although that term doesn't seem fitting when both parties are over 55) daughter meet and hit it off well enough to go on a single date,  at least one of these relationships probably won't go the distance. So if one of the two relationships did actually work out and the parties chose to make a legal connection out of it, two other people for whom it didn't work out would occasionally be thrown together, probably uncomfortably. The same is true regardless of which relationship works out.

My cohort mate says his mother has tried to set him up for dates before, and always with disastrous results. The girls that his mother thinks are right for him, he says, are straight out of the Luther League. He's a Scandinavian who was raised Lutheran.  His parents split up when his father, who was the church choir director, had an affair with the pastor's wife. He escaped it all and wants no part in either parent's social scene.

I don't really care if I'm playing a part in someone's deception of someone else. I also am not worried about long-term ramifications of this scenario. It's up to my cohort mate to explain to his mother at graduation next year why the two of us who were engaged are no longer an item. It's really not my problem. I'm merely helping this one time. I don't expect it to become a recurring gig.