You just don’t get me.

I wanted you to listen and feel with me.

Stop giving me solutions and just listen to me.

Why are you so quiet?

No, that’s not what I meant.

Are you listening to me?

I want you to want to.

I don’t have to tell you; you should just know it already.

WELL,

Sarah just gave me the Best Valentine’s Gift Ever:

It’s basically like getting the other team’s playbook. Everybody wins, so it’s even better.

Sarah made me an instruction manual for Valentine’s Day. No, seriously. It’s a cute handcrafted book with little snippets of lists of her likes and dislikes, her basic info, and most of all, this mental model and decision diagram of the female brain (well, hers at least).

My logical, rational, Engineer mind rejoices. I love this girl.

On friendship and figuring each other out

What Sarah's helping me realize is that any romantic relationship must be, at its foundation, a great friendship. At the beginning we both assumed we were fantastic friends, which was true in the sense that we'd known each other for a long time and had been involved in similar activities and shared similar worldviews and had mutual friends and similar theologies and had a blast hanging out together. However, I underestimated how much of a "soul-connection" and a chemistry there was to build.

How would you describe chemistry? It's like "clicking" the way you would with your best friend. A friend is someone who knows you, who knows when you're lying, when you're putting on airs or when you're wearing a mask. A friend is someone who you love spending time with, whether it's productive or wasteful. A friend is someone who shows you their humanity and gives you an authentic look at their ugly sides and fears and insecurities. A friend is someone you can be yourself around and know you're accepted for who you are.

Quite frankly, we've had our share of struggles figuring each other out, and that's made us realize that we've got a long ways to go as a friend and as romantic interests. I think we both were frustrated by a lot of Totally Normal friction points. You know, the little stuff that results in conversations which leave neither of us feeling heard or understood. I can be overly rational and logic-driven; she can be overly feelings-centric and impulsive at times. I had trouble adapting to her playful, button-pushing personality and she often felt stifled by my straightlaced by-the-rules philosophy. We come from families with different cultures and generational differences. The list goes on.

We both agree we've got a lot to learn about each other, and it's been hard accepting that fact in light of high expectations. There is that expectation that we're the closest of friends, yet we've had tons of times where she feels like I don't get her. We've been acknowledging that we've really got to give each other a lot of grace and forgiveness in the times when we feel unheard, and we need to be patient. It's been tough, but we know it's worth it.

I'm learning how to be a good friend

I've begun to realize how important it is to be a good friend. As I've mentioned previously, I'm starting to realize how my self-sufficiency negatively impact my friendships and relationship with Sarah. There's a distance that I've maintained with other people, a distance that I easily maintained whenever I got involved with too many activities and gave lame excuses of "I'm too busy" to hang out. Maybe I've got a deep fear of intimacy (maybe, but I don't think it's totally true). Maybe I'm too task-oriented or goals-driven, so much that I have to get involved with 999 different things at the expense of my friendships.

I'd like to change. I'd like to be that friend who knows another at a heart level, who can tell when a friend's lying or hurting without any words. I'd like to kick it with a buddy simply for the sake of kicking it with him, no matter what I'm missing out on. I'd like to be a heck of a lot more transparent with people about my hopes and my fears.

The horrifying depths of emotional intimacy!

I know it means that I really fully open up to Sarah and tell her about my thoughts and insecurities and dreams. It means telling her always what's really on my mind. There's this emotional vulnerability and interdependency that I've never revealed to anybody (except God and my journal) will open up gradually (and when appropriate), with time, to friends and to Sarah.

It's scary, but I know once again it's worth it. It's like I'm slowly able to take a step back and see who I am, warts and all.

But it's actually tons of fun

Seriously. Dating is great. It's loads of fun. I think Sarah's playful side brings mine out as well, and we have a blast from simple things like taking walks (just laughing about random things), to trying out new places to eat (and since our standards are so low, everything's delicious), to playing sports (it's my dream to beat her once in bowling. And tennis). I feel totally at home with her.

One thing I totally like about her is how she reminds me of infinite reservoirs of Grace--every time I tend to get down on myself, she reminds me that I'm not too far away from God's love. And it's because she's grounded in it--she depends on it, like air for breathing. Not only that, but I've been really blown away by Forgiveness. When we wrong each other, we apologize and forgive. And let me tell you that it is the most amazing feeling to be forgiven by somebody you've wronged and it always gives me this sensation that the Father's forgiveness is far weightier and far more significant than I had imagined.

All this to say, it's been a humbling nine months. When I first started dating, I only had a rough idea of what it meant to be working things out to this detail with somebody else. I knew that dating would be awesome and it would be rough. But it wasn't till I actually got up close and wrangled with these issues did I realize how much junk there was to work out in me. Sarah and I have a ways to go, and this process of patiently working things out between us has been tiring, but it has been good.

I'm thankful for this girl.

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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!

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As a boyfriend, I'm newly challenged by the call to care for and serve somebody. And I know I haven't written much about Sarah and my relationship, but I'll say that every day I learn a little bit more about how God loves. I'm reminded what a good gift she is to me. I think I want to describe how things have changed since and what we're looking at now.

As a single guy, I could spend my time wherever and whenever I wanted it. I had freedom. I could think about my future for myself and have a reasonable trajectory to achieve whatever goals I had. Honestly speaking, I had more freedom with respect to my time and my plans.

As a dating guy, life is a bit busier. I spend a lot more time with Sarah. I'm listening a lot more, processing things with her, and she does the same with me. We're starting to think about the future, but negotiating how to walk through it together.

This process of thinking forward, together, is a good process, albeit new to us. It's partially fueled by the inexorable tide of graduation and post-college scariness, and partially by the desire to be with each other. There are challenges to that, particularly as we don't know how our passions and dreams will intersect in the future. I want to have it all marked down and planned out; I want to solve for all the variables before plunging into a commitment. It's hard to plan for the future without knowing how far you should look ahead.

I'm learning that this dating thing is so. much. about. trust. It's so much about trusting in the other to look out for your best, but much, much, more about us both trusting that Jesus knows where he's taking us.

There's a beautiful dimension to this process, and you can find it in the commitment. I think that's the Gospel key that Christian relationships should be characterized by: making a commitment to the other (even when the variables aren't in place), dying to self, looking out for the best of the other, and following hard after Jesus together. I'm slowly, slowly learning.

In the end, we're clinging onto Jesus and praying that he's gonna tell us where to go. I don't completely understand what that means, and a part of me writes it off as naivete.

So much of this is new and scary to me, but another part of it has been there all along, you know? It comes back to the Gospel and how Jesus did it first--we get to model it out now.

It's all worth it. It's totally worth it.

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