How I met my sweetie and all the dating mistakes we both made.
During this time, I was still dating other men. Two of the men were taking the exact opposite approach in the respect they let me know they liked me. The followed up on dates immediately. It was all good and made me wonder about the third man and his seemingly ambivalent approach to women. He goes out with me and proceeds to talk about all the women in his past. I would have to say I knew nothing about the women in the other two men’s life. I knew one had an ex because he had a son that was the extent of my knowledge and that was enough.
Too often, we think we are judged by our past and live our lives according to our past. How depressing! I’ve heard men glory in their days as a high school athlete to the extent that they fail to make anything of their present. On the other hand, I’ve seen people bemoan their miserable past and hold onto it as if it were a life jacket. I was at the point that I wanted my past dwelling date to come join me in the present. Dates were awkward when all the previous women joined us. I am selfish enough to only want it to be the two of us.
I will admit to throwing out horrible date stories too. I have a few of them, but it was all getting a little tiresome. It was equivalent to riding a lazy trail horse. You know where you want to go and are aware the horse can get you there, but he keeps wanting to turn and head back to the familiar barn. All the same, I stayed the course. Maybe because deep down I sensed something was different.
How many of you would have made it to date three?
By the third date, I was at the point that I might stop seeing him since I was so unsure of his affections. This was the date where he extended his time with me, including multiple kisses proving that he was very much worth dating. It was the date where I made my decision to keep seeing him. Even though he made his mental decision too on this date, it did not become smooth sailing, far from it. Our phone calls sprinkled with dead zones made me wonder if he hung up on me, but he always promptly called back. His work took him out town and he didn’t push for dates, but rather politely suggested them. He was well aware I was dating other people since I gave him my blog address.
Our relationship developed through emails, texts, phone conversations, and actual dates. The funniest misunderstanding we had was when I was fishing for a compliment on the phone. I asked him if I was prettier than previous girlfriends? (What a needy question. I even expected him to lie and tell me I was.) His response was somewhere along the line that he had dated many beautiful women. That shut my mouth in a hurry. I also took a bullseye to my self esteem and I wondered if I could compete. (When I told him about this, he was shocked because that wasn’t what he meant to say at all. He meant to say I was the most beautiful. I was willing to accept that, truth or not. LOL)
While I dated other guys, I never mentioned it to my sweetie, but I wanted him to tell me to drop the other guys. I wanted a declaration that he wanted me all to himself. Instead, when I told him I closed my eHarmony account, he suggested maybe I should extend my membership to have more fodder for my blog. Stunned, I went out with a man who was pushing for a date, but I wasn’t that interested in. (My sweetie told me later that he was still unsure of me even by date five, but he wanted me to date only him.)Would have been nice if he mentioned this.
When he told me he was dropping his eHarmony membership, I asked him if he was sure. He hemmed and hawed about the service and the lack of appropriate matches, never saying it was only me he wanted to date. (He referred to this as a hint where his affections lay. I’ve had better hints.) So far, you may have noticed our path was far from easy from disconnected phone calls to misunderstandings, to falling back to old behaviors that hadn’t served either one of us well in the past.
Add with this, I was trying desperately to do all the behaviors mentioned in all the dating books I’d read. Sometimes, I wish I put them in my task manager on my cell. We managed to get to date seven where we declared our intentions to see only each other. This was much too soon according to all the various books I’d read, but on the other hand I didn’t want to date anyone else. I could, but it would be unfair because I would be thinking of my sweetie.
That turning point date is now part of my past. We can laugh about how unsure we were of each other. Every day, I learn something new about my sweetie. Little things that he loves corned beef or that he played the trumpet in the high school band. I had misunderstood his initial conversation and thought he was in a garage band when he was young. There’s a big difference between the high school band and rock band. He thought I was a party girl and I am practically anti-party girl. He had female co-workers help him write his profile, which inadvertently was written to attract a “good time” girl. I was able to overlook that because most of the male profiles are like that .LOL
So all in all, the path to love is not smooth, but it is well worth traveling.
No comments:
Post a Comment