Thoughts on faith, life, and art.
1. My first, last, and only girlfriend.
Back when I was single, and desiring not to be, I received an abundance of advice from well-intentioned family and friends. Most of it turned out to be pretty good, albeit unsolicited. But out of all the advice, there were two things in particular that I always found to be remarkably unhelpful. The first was, “when you stop looking, you’ll find her.” I mean, it’s pretty common-sense if you think about it. No one wants to be the desperate guy. People can smell that a mile away. That wasn’t really my problem, though. True, I didn’t want to be single, but I also wasn’t really looking. I had probably gone on a grand total of five dates over the course of my entire adult life. Pretty sure that doesn’t constitute looking. Half of those were blind dates, and tragically, I didn’t even know the other half were dates until after the fact! But that was my fault. The realization would hit me when I’d run into my “date” a few weeks later and she was unexplainably mad at me. Oooooh. Lightbulb moment! What did I think would happen if I asked a girl to go to a musical with me, picked her up for said musical, and then took her to a nice restaurant afterward? Can you say clueless much? For real, I just thought we were friends who shared a mutual interest and were having a good time together. To my defense, I hadn't turned 25 yet—my brain hadn’t finished fully developing!
But seriously, there were two reasons I didn’t go on many dates. The first was because I carried a lot of shame from childhood after having been molested by a group of neighbor kids. The crazy thing is that I carried that shame for 20+ years without even knowing it had happened to me. No one in my family even knew. The trauma had caused me to suppress the memories until nearly two decades later. Through a series of what I believe to be God ordained conversations and events, those memories came flooding back one by one over the course of about a week. Suddenly, so many things in my life made sense—including why I didn’t date. It was shame! That event in my life warped my view of attraction and sexuality without me even knowing it happened. As a result, my brain associated attraction with something bad. Something very bad! As a result, I never let on to a soul when I liked a girl. I remember one time my mom innocently asked if I liked someone—for the record, I did—but, I vehemently denied it. I was horrified that she’d even asked, and outraged at the implication. That’s not a normal response. Of course, all that outrage and indignation was internalized. I answered her question with a look of disgust, and an emphatic “no.”
As I grew older, I couldn't understand how all my friends could so freely admit to “liking” someone. How could they be so shameless? Then, as time went by, friends began dating, and even getting married. I began to suspect that this shame thing I was carrying wasn’t normal. Or, if it was, and everyone felt the way I did, they were at least able to push through it somehow. If they could do it, then so could I. And that brings me to the second reason I didn’t date much. I’d had my heart broken in high school. She was one of my best friends in the world, and as these stories always go, I had fallen in love. Rather, looking back, I was in love with the idea of her. Either way, in my mind at the time–I couldn't see myself with any other person. By God’s grace, we both ended up with the people we’re supposed to be with. But at the time, I was devastated when I found out the feelings weren't mutual. I learned from that devastation that I was a “one woman” kind of a guy. I couldn’t go through that kind of pain again, not even once. Therefore, I would wait until I was absolutely certain that she was “the one" before dating anyone. Which, by the way, there’s no such thing as "the one," but I’ll get to that in a later post—because in a way, there also is…
And that leads me to the second piece of unhelpful advice I received—advice I actually asked for! “How do you know if she’s the one?” I would ask. My older, wiser, happily married friends would look off into the distance and with their most sage-like voice, say, “You’ll just know when you know.” Wait, what? What does that even mean? It’s like telling me not to set an alarm, and saying, “you’ll just wake up when you wake up.” Yeah, but will I wake up in time for work? Probably not! “No, seriously!” they’d say, “you’ll just know.” Okay, thanks Yoda. Don’t mind me, I’m just trying to figure out what exactly "I'll know when I know," all the while "not looking" so I can find the person I wasn’t looking for. Confusing much? It was for me! Suffice it to say, I just wrote the whole thing off, and went about my life expecting to be single forever.
I couldn't help but wonder about this girl or that, though, especially when I’d meet someone new. But there were so many variables, variables I knew I didn’t even know but were there nonetheless. Some people make lists, “must have this, must be that,” but that's not how my mind works. All I knew was that there had to be a rightness to it. Some sort of compelling attractive force like the one that snaps two magnets together. I’d never felt that before, but intuitively, for me, I knew that’s what it had to be. Unfortunately, it always seemed as though that magnetic snap was missing with everyone I'd meet—even when they were perfect on paper. I didn’t know how to quantify it other than to say, we just didn’t click.
By the time I met Andrea, I had pretty much accepted the fact that I probably wasn't going to "click" with anyone. The number of things that had to be right just didn't seem plausible. First, there had to be the magnetic snap of rightness, whatever that was. Then, I had to deal with the fear and shame thing, which seemed impossible. Third, and most importantly, she would actually have to like me in return. That meant she would have to have just the right amount of weirdness to put up with my weirdness. That was a tall order. I really, truly, from the bottom of my heart didn’t believe such a girl existed. And if she did, it was by some miracle of God. Especially since to accomplish all that, she would have had to have been a special custom order. As it turns out, she was. . . (posted 10-08-21)