I’ve always had kind of a dubious view of the ability to post a relationship status on Facebook as “It’s complicated”. I’ve always kind of assumed that if two people were into each other and one/both of them had the balls to act on it, then there would be nothing complicated about it. Now I know better.

Courtship – a period during which a couple develop a romantic relationship

I can quite honestly say that I’ve never really consciously courted someone. It seemed like such an old fashioned behavior trope. I imagine top hats and coat tails, billowy dresses and bonnets. I picture long walks in fields and horse drawn carriages. I envision passed notes asking for permission to come calling and invitations to ballroom dancing. I basically just think about Downton Abbey.

[Editor’s Note: JUST LOOK AT WHAT GOOGLE IMAGES SAYS! This shit goes on forever…]

I’ve dated, and I’ve been in short lived relationships, and long term relationships, but what I’m doing now is something that is 100% different. And when I really think about it, I can honestly say that I am enjoying it quite a bit. But I’m not even really sure what I’m doing because… It’s Complicated.

This all stems from the fact that there is a new person in my life who is stupidly important to me. She reads this, so I’m not going to talk about all the reasons why that’s true, but suffice to say that she is.

Hi, I know you’re there.

We have made a conscious commitment to each other that we will not pursue anything romantic for a while and just spend the next few months, or year, or whatever getting to know each other and doing everything we have ever wanted to do. And it’s been an amazing experience for me.

I never thought about when people used to say shit like “always friends first” when dealing with a relationship. I always just assumed that if you were into each other enough to be in a relationship, then obviously you’d be into each other enough to be friends. It just never made sense to just not jump all the way in. I dated someone a while ago that was hesitant to become super physical because she stated that “sex always changes things”. Again, one of those things that I had never really spent any amount of my time thinking about.

Historically, I am really good at staying friendly with the people that I date. It just never made sense to me to cut someone out of your life that you had dedicated that much time to. People are always surprised that I still talk to Her, and if it wasn’t for Her current boy, I’d probably still have dinner with Her a couple times a month. I was with Her for almost 7 years, that’s more than 20% of my life. We weren’t abusive to each other, we didn’t break up on horrible terms – we just realized we weren’t meant to be together forever. That doesn’t mean that all of the good that we had over 7 years should just be ignored. It just means our relationship changed. I am fully aware that this isn’t something that is super normal, and I am also fully aware that there are many relationships that are toxic and the two people should split and never see each other again. I’ve just never personally experienced that.

Anyways, back to the original thought about sex and physical romance. I have always just thought that sex and all of the other fun physical aspects of a relationship were the natural extension and physical representation of how two people connected with each other. The nihilism involved in being able to derive pleasure from someone else’s body for no better reason than you both want to just made sense. There is probably some truth to the fact that once a couple has sex for the first time, the driving force behind hanging out can become the need to have more of it. It becomes an expectation within the activities of the day and can slow the ability for two people to try to continue to grow together as the focus shifts to more carnal activities.

Now I kind of get why you would want to focus on building a solid friendship first. My new friend, let’s call her Elsa, is amazing. I am hard pressed to think of another time in which I was I knew anyone, friend or partner, that has been able to simultaneously inspire me to learn and be better while seemingly accepting me as I am, unconditionally. I had never been in a position where I see the joy that someone is deriving from an activity and think to myself “god damn I want to do that” – my response has invariably been “Wow that’s super cool, but so clearly not my thing” or “I don’t do that” or “I’m not good enough to do that”. Just being around Elsa has changed so much of my outlook on life. Her curiosity of all things in infectious. She just seems to want to know, and one can’t help but feel like they may be ignoring important life activities when they shut down their own curiosity.

Anyways, this is digressing from where I was trying to go. I just have so much to say about Elsa, that it’s very distracting.

Of Courtship

It is like I have found a muse. A muse that I would greatly love to grab and hold onto forever, but with whom we have decided that would be a poor choice of action at this time. A muse that lets me hold her hand, and lays on me when we watch movies, and who I literally want to do everything with. My sister is visiting this week and is floored that I was asking my brother-in-law about camping gear. Now, I have always been passively interested in camping, but have always found reasons to not do it. Now I want to do it, I want to buy a tent and a sleeping pad, and spike my new tent to the beach and wear a dorky headlamp and watch the sun set and rise from the comfort of my sleeping bag. I thought about taking private dance lessons for a day. I really want to learn to lead climb. I am actually getting off my ass and booking travel. I am finally trying to do all of the things that I have wanted to try in passing, but never had the will to do alone. If this is what it’s like to court someone, then maybe those old farts in top hats had it right.

I almost feel bad a lot of the time because I don’t ask enough questions about her. I am not good at asking questions about other people because I feel like I’m prying. But I want to know everything. She told me the other day that being around me makes her feel like she can breathe. Being around her is like I have finally taken a real breath. I hope this works out for us. I really, really, really do. Here’s to hoping kid.

Of Patience

Along the lines of courtship, I am learning quite a bit about myself and my ability to exercise will power and patience. I have always tried to believe that I am a patient person. God knows I was extremely patient with Her (not saying that She wasn’t with me). But typically my patience was always directed towards not becoming angry. It was always a mitigation scenario in which I tried to not lose my cool. I have rarely exercised my patience in waiting for something to improve. Most of the time I am impulsive and just want the things that I want, when I want them. To try and force myself to not act on my impulses because I believe the future path will be better is a new and interesting experience for me.

It is a minor epiphany for me to think about patience in a way that is different than mitigation of anger. I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to learn and perfect ways to not lose my temper. I attribute the fear of losing my temper solely to my father, who had a wicked temper. I don’t ever want to be that person. So I learned patience. I learned to not react to things when they annoyed me. I learned to stop caring about things that I had no control over. I learned to stop getting jumpy about small stuff in my life. I learned to keep it under control.

Even Google defines patience as:

Patience – The capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble or suffering without getting angry or upset

It makes it sound like patience is only a virtue for those who don’t want to get angry. Maybe I’m just taking too literal an interpretation of the word, but if that’s the definition of patience, what’s the word for the ability to wait for something better? I guess it’s still patience and is covered under the stupidly broad term of “capacity to accept or tolerate delay”, but it still seems like the word patience is defined as the ability to handle bad things.

But what if the delay isn’t a bad thing? What if waiting and putting the time in to move towards something better is a good thing? Does that still count as a delay? Does it still count as being patient because I’m not even really using the capacity to not get angry, but am more relishing in the length of time spent to get to do something?

I have always fallen in love too quickly. I don’t regret doing it, but now that I am supposed to be a “mature adult”, that “knows what he wants” I am starting to believe that it makes a lot of sense to really make sure that the 80-10-10 is there before I do it again. At the same time, that doesn’t seem to make any sense either. How can you logic you way through your emotions? That’s probably really rich coming from me, because that’s basically what I do all of the time, but why would you if it was preventing you from fully experiencing all of the good emotions? Does it even really matter?

In my current situation, I there is no real alternative and it is 100% in my and Elsa’s best interests to be patient and fully explore each other’s company before we see if we go any further.

And really, I can’t wait to keep doing exactly what we’re doing.

I haven’t been this happy in a long, long time.