An Update

So, I know that a number of months ago, I made a post about how I got engaged, and then I proceeded to disappear. My life has been pretty insane since then (work, health problems, wedding planning, etc.), but I wanted to give everyone an update on my life.

So, here’s the first part of the story:

As those of you who followed my posts from last spring/summer know, I was doing the whole on-line dating thing. My fiance (who will hereafter be known as J) and I met through match.com. He e-mailed me, and at the time, I was responding to most guys who seemed nice, who wrote a thoughtful message, and who I had something in common with.

We went on a date to get Indian food, and things were really comfortable. The main things I remember thinking after our first date are: “He’s cuter than his pictures. We have similar tastes in TV shows, and he’s easy to talk to–those are nice things. He has passions in life (punk rock and skateboarding and pathology), which, while not my passions, make him an interesting person. I’d go on another date with him.”

As the summer progressed, we went on more dates. Eventually, he expressed interest in getting more serious, and while I was hanging out with him quite a lot and enjoying our time together, I was uncertain. I knew I liked spending time with him, but this was my first potentially serious relationship after things ended with my ex (which left me with a lot of confusion and heartache), and I wasn’t 100% certain what I was looking for in a serious relationship or if I was even ready for one. I also knew that if I was uncertain, we started something serious, and then I realized it wasn’t right, it was going to be much more painful than if I took the time to figure out how I was feeling.

I expressed this to J, and he was wonderfully patient with me. While my indecision was difficult for him, he gave me the space I needed. Eventually, though, at the end of July (after a month or so of indecision and thinking through everything over and over and over again), I said that I wasn’t sure if I was any closer to figuring things out, and maybe we just needed to be friends so that he wasn’t waiting for me indefinitely.

The additional space that this conversation gave me was, incidentally, what I needed to sort everything out. That following week, since there wasn’t any pressure on me to figure out how I was feeling, I was able to hang out with him (since we decided we’d still hang out as friends) and recognize just how happy and calm I felt when I was with him. And how the kind of friendship we were building (one where we were open and honest with one another, and where we just enjoyed spending time together) was exactly what I was looking for in a relationship. Because I wasn’t driving myself crazy trying to analyze how I was feeling, I was able to see how profoundly good I felt when I’m with him and something just clicked in my brain: this is what you’ve been looking for. I didn’t feel the need to double-check things with God–I just knew. (Incidentally, that Sunday is when I had my “Be Still My Soul” experience.)

So, on August 1st, approximately a week after I told J we should probably just be friends, I announced that I had figured out my confusion and wanted to seriously date him. And less than three weeks later we were engaged (which is the next part of story, to be told in an upcoming post…).

A few additional notes:

*Since the whole religion question (date non-Mormons or not?) came up in my being single posts, I will say that he’s the son of a Methodist minister, but our approach to religion is actually pretty similar. I am able to talk with him about religion, he gets it, respects it, and I have a lot of space to be who I am religiously and spiritually (which right now is a Mormon struggling to attend church). Incidentally, he’s much better at going to church than I am.

*A funny story: the first Mormon scripture I ever showed J was part of D&C 132. I was talking to him about being a Mormon feminist, and I showed him that scripture to illustrate a point (I don’t remember exactly what that point was). His reaction was something along the lines of, “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but that’s kind of messed up.” And then he politely mentioned that was the first Mormon scripture I had shown him, which he was not sure was intentional on my part (after which I promptly repented and showed him 2 Nephi 26:33).