Finding Momentum

I’m real­iz­ing that “I’m too busy” is a pathetic, pathetic lit­tle answer.

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Eh, I haven’t kept folks updated on my love life. It’s some­thing I used to be totally can­did about, but some­how I’ve been less will­ing to talk about it (online and in per­son) maybe because I feel like the pres­sure has increased in these last few years.

I usu­ally give folks one of two answers when asked about my love life:

1. “Oh, I’ve actu­ally really been grow­ing as a sin­gle dude and haven’t really felt the need to get a girl­friend yet. I’m really sat­is­fied in Jesus.” Some days I’ll really mean it. And some days I’ll fake my best smile.

2. “Soon…” I’ll give you a vague smile to make you think like I have a plan to ask this girl out in the next few days or weeks or years. I just won’t tell you specifics.

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“Oh, you’ve never been in a rela­tion­ship before?” Peo­ple will usu­ally repeat this aloud to them­selves (maybe they don’t believe me), then they tend to stare at me in this quizzi­cal, crit­i­cal, impa­tient man­ner like I’m a zil­lion miles behind in the EQ Olympic Sprint/Marathon.

A rec­ol­lec­tion slightly tan­gen­tial to the point I’m mak­ing:

I was painfully awk­ward in ele­men­tary school lead­ing into 7th grade. I cov­ered this up with a smi­ley nice-guy per­sona. Totally harm­less. Totally spine­less. Pretty darn shy, espe­cially around girls. I the­o­ret­i­cally knew they existed. They even seemed to be in my classes. Too bad I never really talked to any of them, much less made friends with them. My first con­ver­sa­tion with a g1rl was in the sev­enth grade. It lasted about 10 sec­onds and I was so proud of myself.

End rec­ol­lec­tion slightly tan­gen­tial to the point I’m mak­ing.

High school was bet­ter, but not by much. I fig­ure out that girls aren’t so intim­i­dat­ing after all. I even made friends with a few, and had crushes on a fair share of them.

But let’s pair this still-awkward, more-or-less robotic inter­ac­tions I have with girls and let’s cou­ple it with the “don’t date in high school–or-else” men­tal­ity that’s pretty prevalant in the Asian church (that’s a another story) and you have a recipe for the “let’s be friends but keep our dis­tance so that we won’t raise the chances of devel­op­ing feelings/become codependent/be dis­tracted from studies/fatally fall in love/make babies/drink from the flask of heart­break too soon” mentality.

(To be continued…!)