Finding Momentum

I’m going to be can­did and share with you some dat­ing lessons I’ve learned (with Sarah’s per­mis­sion!). My buddy Jeff was right when he told me, “Dating’s a good way to learn how much you need grace.” And I need boat­loads of it. Here we goooo…

Tran­si­tion­ing from self-sufficiency to dependency

From very early on in my life, I’ve learned to be pretty self-sufficient. That means that I’d always be doing things on my own, doing things on my own ini­tia­tive, mak­ing things hap­pen for myself, you get the gist of it. It’d be totally me cen­tered: I’m going to do this, and I’ll fol­low it up with that. I’ll make my own deci­sions, and you can ask me about how it was afterwards.

Sarah and I have had our moments where I’d show up and tell her “Hey, I’m going to be doing this on Sat­ur­day” with an implicit assump­tion she wouldn’t be a part of it. She’d feel hurt that I’d left her out, and I real­ize now that I had assumed that she just wasn’t inter­ested in them or that I didn’t need her help.

I’m learn­ing to invite her into all parts of my life, from the bor­ing mun­dane things to the big events. Even if I think I can do these things by myself, I’m start­ing to learn to ask for help when I feel like I don’t need any. When I show Sarah that I’m depen­dent on her, it gives her a way to show me that she cares.

Trans­parency, and how it’s okay to not have it all together

There was a period in our rela­tion­ship where I felt incred­i­bly inse­cure about us. I felt like I was los­ing her, I felt like I was being dis­re­spected or I wasn’t good enough, and there was all this crap I was going through.

I didn’t know how to talk about it though, so I acted the oppo­site of how I felt. I acted more con­fi­dently around her when inside my inse­cu­ri­ties spoke louder. I dou­bled my efforts of pur­su­ing her when really I was scared. I real­ize now that by act­ing like every­thing was peachy, I dele­git­imized com­mu­ni­ca­tion that “some­thing was wrong”.

I had some­how con­structed this image of a super-boyfriend, who never spoke of trou­ble but instead slugged through hard times by the force of sheer will and corny jokes. And Sarah could see through all of it–and my inabil­ity to artic­u­late how I was really feel­ing pushed her fur­ther away.

After a long, awk­ward and painful week, we con­fronted it. By finally admit­ting to her that things were off, we were free to finally talk about it.

To be continued!