ROCK HILL, SC—According to Julia Wasson, meeting Miriam and Karl Loftus, parents of her boyfriend Jay, “explained so much.”
“First of all, the car thing,” the 26-year-old Wasson said Monday upon returning from a weekend at the Loftuses’ home in Greenville. “Now I know where Jay gets that obsessive thing about keeping the car clean. His father is even worse than he is.”
Wasson, who began dating Loftus in June 2001, found meeting his parents illuminating in numerous ways.
“Jay is totally passive-aggressive. Like, he’ll agree to go to a party with me even if he doesn’t really want to go, but then as soon as we get there, he’ll say how tired he is and purposely not have any fun,” Wasson said. “His mother pulls the same shit with his father. We all went to see that movie The Royal Tenenbaums, and instead of saying she didn’t want to see it, she just sat there groaning the whole time.”
Wasson said that within two hours of meeting Jay’s parents, some “scary patterns” began to emerge. Among the similarities Wasson noticed was Karl’s insistence that he be the one who handles money, a tendency she noticed in Jay when they went to Florida in December.
Wasson also found that the Loftuses, like their son, never express disapproval of anyone, only sympathy.
“It is so condescending how they’re sorry for everyone,” Wasson said. “It drives me fucking nuts when Jay does that. He acts like he’s being tolerant, but his face scrunches up in a way that says, ’I’m not telling you what I’m really thinking.’ Well, now I know where that face comes from. The first time Karl did it, I thought, ’Holy shit. There’s the scrunch. He’s scrunching.’”
In addition, Karl shares his son’s “crazy obsession with getting an early start.”
“That’s always been a big thing with Jay,” Wasson said. “Anytime we’re going somewhere, the night before, it’s always, ’We should get up really early tomorrow, because we’ve got a lot to do.’ That’s obviously the way it must’ve been when he’d go on family trips as a kid.”
More than anything else, Wasson said she is bothered by Loftus’ “weird evasiveness.”
“Sometimes, Jay will mysteriously say he has to go somewhere and then run out the door,” Wasson said. “Later on, I’ll find out that he just went to the bookstore. Well, on Friday night, Jay’s mom wouldn’t say where she was going, and we later found out she’d gone to the grocery store to pick up some milk. Why do these Loftus psychos feel the need to hide things like that?”
Despite the obvious parallels, Loftus seems oblivious to the traits he shares with his parents.
“Ever since meeting my parents, Julia keeps going on about the ways I’m similar to them,” Loftus said. “She’s completely wrong, but you’ve got to expect that sort of overanalysis from an only child of two psychologists.”
Wasson, for her part, fears that the similarities will only grow.
“I’ve got to keep an eye on this,” Wasson said. “If Jay continues to become more like Karl, I could fall into the ’Miriam role,’ constantly vying for his attention, only to ultimately annoy him and push him further away. I’ve seen the future and, let me tell you, it is scary.”
