It's Been A Minute...

It's been a minute since I posted any content on here.  Which doesn't actually matter since I'm the only one who reads it.

I am, thereby, effectively talking to myself here.

I'm OK with that. 

Nothing much has changed, though, so even had I kept religiously to my blogging here...I'd still be right where I left off a year ago only YOU the non-existent reader would be really, really bored.  So I did you a favor by not posting, truth be told.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

I started online dating again--after a year long hiatus.  It's only been a few weeks but I'm committed to really, REALLY trying.

This time.

Maybe.

We'll see.

A good friend recently got married.  I met her just a few months before she met her husband.  She was really, really eager to be in love...to be married.  She'd had her wedding partly planned out with each relationship and felt heartbreak after heartbreak.

She and I had made plans to join some kind of group dating service, but then, lo and behold, she met "the one" (via online dating), and she knew almost immediately...as in, within a month.

I was SUPER skeptical.

First of all, how does one "know" in ONE month that one is "meant to be" FOREVER...?????  That's the REST OF YOUR LIFE!!!  I was flabbergasted...but my friend was SO sure.

Secondly, he didn't seem to be acting/behaving like a man who was similarly "into" HER.  For example, he flaked on dates (frequently) & sometimes took hours to respond to text messages.  She and I had many, many conversations about what this meant, exactly.  Did he like her?  Was he "into" her?  We sometimes couldn't tell--or, at least, I couldn't.  She was SURE the whole time that it was "true love".  When she would recount the latest drama of him not texting or cancelling a date etc. etc.  I remember deliberately trying to keep my facial expressions neutral so as not to reveal my true feelings (one of my eyebrows tends to reflexively & TOTALLY involuntarily raise-entirely of it's own volition-when faced with things that appear/present as bullshit...It's not my fault & totally out of my control.  It's a ROGUE eyebrow).  It just felt like he was at least sending "mixed signals", if not telling her that he was "just not that into her" by his lack of responsiveness or his flaki-ness, and in my world that was someone to be DUMPED...promptly.  Why waste your time??  It just seemed so clear to me that if he were REALLY "into" her, that he would "make time" and that she would SO OBVIOUSLY become the priority.

But, as it turned out, the whole time he was SURE that she was also "the one", only he was terrified of messing it up. 

After four months of dating they moved in together.  Two months later he proposed, she accepted & they married less than two years after their first date in a lovely, intimate ceremony wherein their self-written vows brought the entire audience to tears. 

So sweet.

Simultaneous to this happy event, I had another friend who, in the decade I have known her, had dated jerk after jerk, married man after married man (often without her realizing they were married) only to suddenly reconnect with an old flame-a MARRIED old flame.  She declared it to be fate (his marriage was "falling apart", after all), and he declared that he'd never stopped loving her...8 months later he left his wife, filed divorce papers & they are planning their life together. 

All this has shown me that you just never know.

Life can change on a dime.

I am sincerely, fervently hoping that this holds true for me as well...