Previous installments of this series are found here.

I arrived at his place late Friday night, an apartment near Allen and Delancey in the Lower East Side. “When my mom comes to visit, she complains about the trash in this neighborhood,” he laughed (I would soon learn that, like many other Persian men, his mother visited a lot). The apartment itself was decently decorated—the prerequisite Persian carpets that his parents had hauled from Iran for him, his framed soccer jerseys from professional teams, some vanity photos of him on the soccer field, and a huge-ass TV in which to watch sports.

“You chew?!” I asked, picking up the tin on the coffee table.

“Only a few times a year when I’m stressed out,” he said, mocking embarrassment. “I’m from Colorado after all.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said, putting the tin back down.

Like a true Persian, I had brought my backgammon board. I opened it and began setting up. He plugged in his iPod and started playing Jack Johnson. I might have thrown up in my mouth a little. Then it got worse: Dave Matthews. I hadn’t listened to “DMB” since I was a senior in high school.

We played a practice round of backgammon where I let him win. Then we played a real game and I beat him to show him who he was dealing with. We played again and I let him win so he’d feel like a man. Then I won the last two games because he needed to be put in his place. To ease his bruised ego, I pretended to be very impressed by his extensive knowledge of investment banking. Then I walked around his apartment and made comments about the books on his shelves, the pictures of his family. Neither of us had spoken Farsi to each other yet; we were shy about our American accents. We talked for a long time until it was two in the morning and I said I had to go, so we went downstairs and he hailed a cab for me. As I got in the cab, I had to tell myself, We are just friends. “Right?” I asked myself. “Right??”  But truth be known, I had stumbled into verboten territory: The dreaded, humiliating but inevitable post-rejection-but-still-hanging-out “Are We Really Just Friends?” stage.

After a year of dating exclusively Persian men (sometimes three a week!), I was still alone on Valentine’s Day, the stupidest day of the year. “happy vday,” my Former Professional Soccer Player Turned Banker texted me. Apparently, not only did I not get roses or a phone-call, but I got a text message instead—not even the whole “Valentine’s” spelled out! Not even capital letters or punctuation! What had my yearlong experiment descended into? He had ruined my game. I was not going out on dates anymore because I only wanted him… and he had already told me in no uncertain terms that he was “not interested in a relationship.” We were afterall Just Friends.

But I continued to denigrate myself, all in the name of attraction. “He’s mature enough to be financially stable!” I told myself. “We have so much to talk about regarding our upbringing (even if he’s a jock)! And, dammit, his professional athlete body is such a bonus!”  We made plans to hang out one Saturday. When the day rolled around, I hadn’t heard from him yet, so I emailed him to ask what time we were going to meet. “Sorry!” he replied. “I totally forgot and I got corporate seats for a Rangers game tonight with a friend!” Flaking out quickly became his M.O. Another time, it was because he got tickets to a concert by a band called “Slightly Stoopid.” He was the one who was slightly “stoopid,” in my opinion. Once should have been enough, but to flake out two times? I was asking for it. But I kept telling myself that the glorious moments in between were worth the pain.

When I got upset about the endless flaking, Former Professional Soccer Player Turned Banker texted me: “u want to be more than friends and that’s not fair and it is hard to just be ur friend. i am attracted to u.”

Stupid, stupid, stupid, how could I have been so stupid??

“u should be fair to u.”

Idiot, idiot, idiot, I was such a moron. His line of reasoning made no sense to me. Either you’re attracted to someone and you want to be with them, or you’re not attracted to them and don’t want to be with them. Apparently, that’s not how it works for men: They are much more logical and think about things like careers and general reality.

I stopped returning his texts. But his texts continued for months afterwards. At the annual Persian Parade on Madison Avenue just a month later, I received one: “R u at the parade?” We met up with each other at the after-party in Madison Square Park right as the DJ started pumping Persian techno. We waved to each other across the sea of bodies. He walked over. We said hello. Eventually, we would cease communication entirely. He would be genuinely confused about what happened.

Dating Persian men after having been born and raised in the U.S. was—to use Persian-invented board games as an analogy—like playing backgammon with checker-playing skills: the pieces were the same, but the board and the rules and the objective were completely different. These Persian men had penises like every other man, but their Rules were different.

In the end, I had fallen for another American in Persian skin just like me. If there was one thing I came to accept about the differences in American dating and Persian dating, it was that American dating was individualistic and selfish, while Persian dating was of a collectivist tradition in which one goes through with the deal for the good of the whole, for the good of pro-creating and extending family, which is the goal above everything else. This was not the reality of my American existence. We were hyper-independent, we had no real need for other people (so we thought), and ultimately, the choices were so plenty that there was no need to commit to any one thing (or person). It was a double-edged sword: For me, it meant I was an independent, outspoken woman who lived by herself and made her own living, albeit alone. For my paternal grandmother (who was murdered by her brother in an “honor killing”) just two generations ago, it meant that her attempt to become an individual by filing for divorce was the end of her life. I had had enough sex over the past year to make up for the sex she never got the chance to have.

And now there was just one more month left until the Persian New Year and the end of my experiment. I couldn’t wait to hit the “eject” button on IranianPersonals.com and to delete my profile forever, having fulfilled my self-imposed requirement. Persian New Year went by the lunar calendar so it took a little research to figure out what day it fell on every year. I studied lunar charts and scoured the internet for the exact date and time the New Year would take place. I marked it on my calendar, then I began counting down the days.