Amen!

Hallelujah and Amen!

I am so very tired of hearing the complaining. I'm so tired of seeing the bitter and desperate women in singles wards. I'm sick to DEATH of the whining.

I believe Roxie once said "I'm single because I'm not married", which is exactly how I feel. I live a happy, full, and (mostly) productive life. My relationship status really has nothing to do with it and I'm tired of the girls and women who claim that they'll be happy when they're dating someone.

You know what? BE HAPPY NOW. Look at your life, stop focusing on what you don't have, and start focusing on what you DO have. Believe me, it's a lot easier to be happy than to be miserable. Misery takes a lot of energy. Don't get me wrong--being happy takes some effort, but it's healthy, focused, energizing effort that becomes easier with time. I've also realized that no one can make me happy, but people definitely add to my happiness. If you go around expecting someone to be attracted to you when you act desperate, look old and tired, and seem boring, you're not doing yourself any favors.

For goodness' sake, go out and buy a new outfit, get a new haircut, and maybe take a painting class instead of sitting around complaining. Investing in yourself is one of the best ways to get others to invest in you.

The Perfect Proposal

No, not mine, at least not yet.

But I incedulously read at Manolo for the Brides about a whole magazine (Engagement 101) being written to provide tips on how to propose. Except the thing is geared towards women and men probably won't even know it exists and all it's going to do is build unrealistic and unnecessary expectations for what a proposal should be like. Those poor guys don't stand a chance if their girlfriend is reading that magazine.

Jinxie wrote a bit about proposals a month ago (Rings do not go in food). I've even talked about it a bit before (Greed and Disgust).

I offer here the two necessary requirements for a perfect proposal.

1. A man and a woman who love each other, a lot.
2. A man and a woman who know each other as best as they possibly can, really know each other. (This of course means that you will continue to get to know each other for the rest of eternity because we are all rather complex creatures.)

Anything more than that is unnecessary. If the girl (and I use that term on purpose) absolutely will not say yes unless the man flies her to Paris or buys her 100 roses or something completely ridiculous, she's not mature enough to get married and the guy is actually better off with her saying no.

If they truly do know each other, then the man will know the exact perfect thing to do for his woman, and it will be beautiful and romantic for how well it fits their relationship.

I like watching the movie The Mirror Has Two Faces. Barabara Streisand's character Rose says, "I tell you what I envy about people in love - I'd love it if someone knew me, really knew me. What I like, what I'm afraid of, what kind of toothpaste I use. I think that would really be wonderful."

That's what I'm waiting for. Some day someone will really know me, and he won't need a glossy magazine to tell him how to propose.

The woman in the song

Things have been relatively calm for me relationship wise, but I still get the itch to write. So I thought now would be a good time to get through some articles and whatnot that I've been wanting to respond to for a while.

Jeez, over a year ago, a friend showed me the blog Charming, but Single, and in particular her post "Coming clean in a roundabout sort of way." I don't read the blog any more because, 1. she stopped really posting, and 2. she just really didn't seem to have a handle on life. But that particular post has stayed with me and I've wanted to write about how wrong she is on one point ever since seeing it.

She says:

I do want to be the Woman in the Song – the one who makes him crazy, keeps him up at night, without whom his days would all be nights. And even as I think that, I immediately reject the notion of such as pure fantasy. We don’t all get to be the heroine. We aren’t all the Woman in the Song.

She's wrong. We do all get to be the heroine. We do all get a chance to be the woman who makes him crazy, who keeps him up at night, without whom his days would all be nights. It is not pure fantasy!

And the best thing is that he will be your hero. He will make you crazy, keep you up at night, without whom your days would all be nights.

And it will feel like it is better than any fantasy, beyond your wildest imagination.

Some of us heroes and heroines just take longer to find each other. Some of us don't hear the music to that song till later. But if you don't believe you are a heroine, then your hero won't see you as such either. I have seen many couples where I know I could not have married the guy and been happy with him, but the woman who did marry him is happy beyond belief, and he couldn't be more in love with her. So in the end, it does all work.

In the end, we are all the woman in the song. We just have to find the man that is singing.

Impending...

Well, yes, it's been several months since I've posted here. I sometimes feel like I don't have much to contribute, because I don't really date and it honestly gets boring when all I have to talk about is my knitting and my cats (I'm such a spinster!). But today, I have something I need to get out of my system before I cry here at work. A man (we'll call him David) I consider to be one of my closest friends is moving to a different state in three weeks. There are a lot of emotions in my head and heart about this right now and I'll do my best to keep them more or less coherent and easy to follow.

First, a brief history: David and I met almost eight years ago (eight years in June) and seemed to hit it off well. I spent a lot of that summer with him and his friends, and everyone we knew wanted us to date. That never happened (and that's ok) but it could have. We spent so much time together. I also spent a lot of time at his house the next summer, when I was literally going crazy with depression and anxiety about some other events in my life. (When I say depression, I mean the full-on, actually diagnosed, suicidal, not eating, not sleeping version, which lasted for almost two years, not the "oh I missed 'Friends' I'm so depressed" version. Just to clarify.) I felt safe with him--safe enough that I fell asleep on his bed one night while he and his best friend "Jimmy" were fixing a computer, and I can't sleep anywhere but in my own bed. He saw me spiral down, and then he moved back home to California that August. He'd call or IM me almost every day for 6 months as I continued to plummet, and when he came back the next April, he was the person who tried to make me eat. At one point, he confronted me about being anorexic; years later I realized that he was the only one of my friends at the time who was concerned enough to risk our friendship. I wasn't anorexic, but it certainly seemed like it because my depression caused nearly complete loss of appetite and no one really saw me eat anything--I just wasn't hungry.

He was there the night I finally hit bottom, over a year after the event that triggered the depression. I cried to him for three hours and at the end of it, he said "You need to remember that you are a good person no matter what happened. None of this is your fault, and I want you to promise me that you'll stop thinking that" and gave me a big warm hug.

A year later, I ended up dating his neighbor for a few weeks, and then I stopped going to David's house for games every Sunday because I still wasn't better and there were a couple of people there who triggered some very weird moments in my brain. Not long after I stopped going to his house every weekend, he started dating someone I (mistakenly) didn't approve of. We butted heads about her several times, until it finally came to a head and he chewed me out in an email. We stopped talking for several months, until I became engaged to Ray and was more stable. Meanwhile, David and Anne were becoming more and more serious, and because I wasn't so crazy anymore, I could finally see her good qualities and what an amazing person she was (and still is). David and I patched things up, and I was able to be there for both him and Anne when they broke off their engagement, just like they were for me when Ray broke up with me for no good reason exactly two months after asking me to marry him.

In the ensuing couple of years David and I have reestablished a pretty good relationship. Looking back on all of it, I am overwhelmed by exactly how much I value, respect, and love him. This man met me when I was normal and stable and happy, watched me fall apart both emotionally and physically, saw me through hell and back, helped me get through my own broken engagement, offered to break Ray's knees for hurting me so badly, was willing (and happy!) to renew our friendship after so long, was patient with me when I hated him, and has been an incredible support and example.

He's moving in three weeks. This move will be good for him. He'll finally get away from "Diane", who has been trying to convince him to marry her ever since she elbowed me out of his life while pretending to be my "best friend". She won't take no for an answer, and he's told her no several times. She is manipulative, selfish, demanding, and needy, and he can't extricate himself from her because she always finds a way back in. Now, part of this is his fault, and he knows it, but I've felt for a long time (ever since he and Anne broke up) that he needs to get back to his home turf, get the desert back into his bones, and reset his life. I know this will be good for him, and I know he'll be better for it, but it still hurts that he's really leaving. I love him very much, and even though the likelihood of us ever getting to a romantic relationship is remote (despite the attraction to each other we've both confessed), and even though we'll have the Internet and phones and he's offered his extra bedroom to me when he buys a house, I feel like part of me is already missing. He is truly one of the best people I've ever met and I will miss him more than I can really express. I don't know if he'll ever really comprehend everything he's done for me, and I can only hope that I've done anything remotely close for him.

I hope I have.

May is going to be a hard month.

What's it like being an apteryx?

I enjoy the comics. Some of them make me laugh. Some of them are real profound. Some of them start week-long discussions about what we expect in relationships. And then today's BC strip struck a little close to home. (link to the comic strip)

Part of why it might have seemed so timely was a discussion on Segullah today about being single in the LDS Church - All the single ladies.

I honestly feel like that poor flightless apteryx some times. I'm fine with my single status until someone asks about it or points it out.

• Hey single person! What's it like going home to an empty house every day?
• Hey single person! What's it like going to church all alone every week?
• Hey single person! What's it like...

You get the idea.

It's kind of like when a child falls and then looks at you. If you react scared, asking if they are okay, they start crying and figure they are hurt because you drew attention to the fact that they fell. If you laugh and give them back their ball, they realize they weren't hurt that bad and they are really okay after all.

Just give me back my ball and I'll be fine.

If a chimp can take it's mate on a date...

It was with interest that I recently read a report on the mating habits of chimpanzees. It seems that the male chimps that go off and hunt meat and then bring it back to the group and share it with the females in the group get to have more sex with said females than the males in the group that don't treat the females to dinner. And it isn't an immediate exchange either. The male might bring the female meat for a while with no sex. But then when she's fertile, that male that brought her food gets to have twice as much sex as the self-ish ones.

So what is the lesson in all of this?

It's simple. Men who take women on dates get the women. Men who are self-ish or just hang out, don't get the women.

I mean, if a male chimp can court the female and take her out to dinner, why is it so hard for male humans to figure out the same thing?

From Elder Oaks (Dating versus Hanging Out, Ensign, June 2006):

My single young friends, we counsel you to channel your associations with the opposite sex into dating patterns that have the potential to mature into marriage, not hanging-out patterns that only have the prospect to mature into team sports like touch football.

And also:

A “date” must pass the test of three p’s: (1) planned ahead, (2) paid for, and (3) paired off.

I'm 30. I'm not going to hang-out any more. And honestly, I haven't wanted to hang out since the end of my mission.

I think I speak for many when I say, stop hanging-out and start bringing me meat!

And I did get a date Saturday night. And it was great.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

A week of emails and discussions later (some of those emails were practically five-page double-spaced papers, one of mine even including section headings and references), we've reached a new level of understanding. We referenced examples in speeches, comic strips, movies, television shows, and commercials. The conclusions we reached about each other, what we expect from relationships, and what we are comfortable with were extremely eye-opening in some places, even as I thought just about myself and who I am.

But I'm left wondering - Where is the instruction manual???? Why can't I just get a booklet that lists what to do in different situations or the best way to express a thought or idea to be understood? Surely we are not the first two people in the world who have tried to work this out, why hasn't anyone written it down before? We have instructions on how to use shampoo, why can't we have instructions on how to talk to a man? (And before you say it, I've read "Mars & Venus" and other books, and they really wouldn't help at all in this situation, in fact, I've found they aren't much use in most situations.)

I need to find the lather-rinse-repeat label on this relationship. Because right now it seems to be almost try-fail-discuss. At least the failures are getting smaller and the discussions are getting better.

Latest strange compliment: You're an oddball. But it was said with such love that it makes me smile

"Not Dating"

JT, the mature guy who was recently dippin' in my sauce this last weekend and I have decided not to date. Yet.

We want to. We both like each other very much, and think highly of each other. But for reasons that are not mine to disclose in a semi-public forum, we cannot be together right now.

So what do we do in the meantime? We want to be friends and continue to see each other. However, because of the highly random way in which we met, we don't, currently, have mutual friends with whom to buffer our time together, nor do we run into each other incidentally. It's always on purpose. And so, when it's just the two of us, and it's planned and paired off, it very much resembles a date.

How do we avoid that? What makes two heterosexual people of opposite genders spending time together not a date?

We decided it was the attitude we have going in. On a date, there is pressure to impress, to be on our best behavior, and eventually snag a mate. On a non-date, you're just you, hanging out and having fun with a good friend. We likened it to a difference between flirting just for fun and flirting to get into someone's pants. Those talented in the art of flirting are very much aware of the difference.

We didn't vocalize this, but non-dating also requires abstaining from anything friends wouldn't do. Kissing, especially. This one's hard, especially if you've already kissed each other before, and you know how much you enjoy it. However, not kissing can be achieved. Even if you have to put a physical barrier between you and the other person. Hugging, on the other hand, is very much allowed. I'm not sure that JT and I could survive without hugging each other.

We both went into our "non-date" on Saturday thinking it was a non-date. Again, it essentially was, and it obviously ended more as one, but we didn't see it as such. As a result, we were just being ourselves, not on our best behavior, and just focusing on having a good time. Even though we didn't talk about it until this week, the lack of pressure to impress each other is actually really nice. Since the best relationships I've ever been in have come out of friendships, this could actually be really good for us. We're getting to know each other's true selves right away, and hopefully, when we do actually get to date, it will be an easy transition.

There is a trick here, and this goes for both dating and not dating. Both parties have to know exactly what is going on. Obviously, if you don't know whether or not you want to pursue something with someone, you don't have to communicate that until you do. But, once you know, you should alleviate confusion by discussing it. If it's dating, that's easy, you just have to say "I'd like to take you on a date this Saturday." If it's not dating, and you think that the other person is trying to date you, then you should also be clear of your intentions. In our case, we were just being friends, and then we kissed, and we needed to make sure we really knew (again, via video chat, as face to face as we can usually get during the week, but it's WAY better than IMing or texting) what was going on.

And we do. And it's good. I like that we talk as much as we do, and we make sure that, at least in regards to us, we know what the other person is thinking. I plan on making sure that continues.