On What Goes Through Your Head When You Think You May Have Met The One

What happens when you meet The One?

Saying no is easy. It’s so simple. No. No. No. No. It’s so easy to say.

Saying yes is terrifying. Because you only get to pick once. And because if a guy will give you everything that it takes to be your soul mate, is he The One?

How do you say yes?

What does it feel like?

How do you stop saying no? When you’re so good at it.

Saying yes means that you trust someone to be the one thing you’ve never been: faithful to someone.

How can you? And when you meet someone, and it is easy – when it is so, so easy, how can you not?

How can you stop staring at the ceiling at night because something real is happening and you’d deluded yourself forever that it wouldn’t?

Is this real? Is it another phase? Is it your settle-down phase that will disappear like all the rest because the parents don’t agree, or the brother hates him, or, worst of all, he winds up figuring out that you’re not worthy of that pedestal?

Is it normal to have someone scare the living daylights out of you because you kind of want to talk to him for the rest of your life, and you kind of want to run away as fast as you can, to Norway or someplace, while you still can?

Is it normal to cry on the phone because their sin costs you so much? And because everything you have ever done wrong in your life is now their problem?

Does it make you crazy when your right knee bounces up and down all day because for the first time in your life you can’t wait one.more.second for him to just end all of this and run off to the county courthouse with you?

And because you’re terrified of what will happen when he really wants to?

Is it normal to want so badly for him to just go away and stop looking at you like that because you’re so afraid you might just break down sobbing because he melts your soul? And for you to be so unspeakably thankful that he is grabbing your waist and won’t let go, because you really don’t know how to say that the second he lets go, you’re going to feel like crying for seventy-two hours?

Is it normal to cry when you get a text from your dad that says, “I don’t know if I like him or not?” with this big, friendly question mark, because it is the most devastating thing in the world, even though how can your dad know? It’s been a whirlwind. He can’t know. He has a clear head and you don’t.

It was a day. One day. You knew him three hours and you told your best friend that he was The One, and he is, which may have nothing to do with whether or not you ever get to marry him….or even kiss him.

Is it normal to keep the flowers he sent you on another desk because it aches for you to be so close to something that he loves so much?

Is it normal to feel like your life is ending if you haven’t heard from him in forty minutes (eye appointment, or more likely he has fallen out of love completely) and to be totally frightened when his best friend says: So! Summer wedding for sure, because the only one single thing in the world worse than not knowing is knowing?

You want to keep it at bay forever, because you’re an incurable pessimist.

Because no one you love this much could ever work.

Because there is no way God is THAT good.

And then you cry because He is that good. And because even though He is good, He may not give you this thing. And because He is not wrong if He doesn’t. But you still hope, you hate yourself for hoping, that He might.

Is this what all of those stupid married people called love at first sight? They acted so naturally, and you wanted to shake them. Until it was you, and you had nothing to say publicly. Just: It’s going fine. When what you want to say is:

I’m exploding.

I can’t keep waiting.

I can’t stop waiting.

I would wait for you the rest of my life.

An iMessage Conversation Between Two Attractive, Attentive Twenty-Something Girls Who Have No Marriage Potentials

Her: The whole thing with [thinking Dan was interested in being more than friends when he wasn’t] made me realize that I’m ready to have a guy in my life…..more so than I allowed myself to acknowledge before. I don’t mean I’m hurt by it, not at all. But it just opened my eyes in a new way. And the hardest part of everything…..there is nothing I can do about it, or any of us.

Me: It’s all so foreign, so faraway, that I’m not sure we’d know what to do. Like if someone came along, I mean.

Her: Exactly. It’s hard for you watch your friends have a boy come into the picture, and the relationship develop, when….why are there no guy options for us?

Me: Yeah. I feel like I don’t understand it. What made him take it to the next level? I get friendship and I get marriage. But the evolution from one to the other just baffles me because it seems like it never happens for, you know, me.

Her: Yes, exactly. I look at you, my sister, myself, and I wonder, Why don’t the guys want to take it to the next level? No, we are not perfect, but we have so much to offer. I feel like we’d all make incredible girlfriends and God-glorifying wives.

Me: Yes. Yes. And then for every guy like Dan who doesn’t pursue a girl like you I lose a little faith in men maybe, or in the institution of marriage; like, I feel that maybe the problem is that nobody is interested in marriage anymore. Maybe we are the problem? Or maybe not. Maybe we haven’t met enough guys? But it seems so easy for everybody else: a guy meets all of those other girls and he said, “I like her enough to make this work”—and he does. HOW? What indistinguishable quality does she have that I don’t?

Her: I know! It makes me feel like I am missing something….or not worth pursuing, but WHY?

Me: Everybody says: YOU CAN’T RUSH IT! It just happens! But it IS happening for everybody else and I’m never even CLOSE to moving from one category to the other.

Why I Hate Guests

I have out-of-town company, and I am vaguely inhospitable and uncooperative with everything. I attribute this to my Hot Little Brother (HLB). Whenever girls meet my brother, they are different afterwards.

I told Boss today that I hate when HLB is nice to nice girls. “Let them figure it out!” Boss said, “If this chick is twenty five years old and hasn’t figured out when a man is playing with her, she’s an idiot.” I disagreed with that, because they – HLB and Boss – have for years used this as their general excuse to destroy all sorts of good, trusting hearts.

They always think that it is the girl’s responsibility to recognize and be impervious to their games, but don’t they realize that it would never work if everyone was as stalwart as they should be around the bad boys?

HLB is a good man; he’s an excellent man. He’s godly and wise, and good with children, and charming, and funny. But he never stays around for anyone; he’s a relationship gypsy, who drifts here and there breaking hearts and not quite meaning to exploit people. These guests of mine are the sweetest ladies, and they have no idea that they don’t stand a chance.

Maybe many girls know this going into it; and I think that’s why I never really mind when he plays around in his own league, with girls who have as much to lose as he does. But I typically become very defensive when he meets my friends, because although about ninety percent of HLB’s victims are plenty deserving, there is a nice girl here and there who thinks she is going to be the one person to tame him, and thinks moreover that his skills for making girls love him are expended on her only.

Boss knew I was in a bad mood today so he rushed back to my office, blowing in around one o’clock with all sorts of excitement and saying that he was going to go take me to see “some skinhead get arrested…..don’t bring your stupid phone, you’ll probably record something accidentally again and you can’t record this!” I accidentally recorded one conversation, once, and have never been able to live it down.

We went out there in a whirlwind, which was a trap for him to give his big speech about HLB. “It’s all about the chase; the kill means nothing,” he told me, “They’ll be okay, just like you are always okay. Let them have a nice time and go back to their own state to remember their week of being flattered and treated like a queen. If they’re really stupid enough to think that your brother has a genuine interest in them, then they’re stupid enough to believe it forever. They’ll probably always look back on this week with butterflies.”

I wished that I could explain that the hardest part is that I am so very susceptible to those things. I am the girl in the world who knows the most about flattery and its ease and deception; and yet, I can be a victim as swiftly as any other girl, and as wholly.

I can lose my head IN A MOMENT,

even knowing

full well

that a piece of flattery is completely made up

and that they are willing to use one line that works

on every girl.

For the smallest, of compliments, I am suddenly ready to give my heart. I wished I could explain that I hate being thus vulnerable, and thus exploited, when from whence my poor heart is, everything means something big and permanent and deliberate. But we work well together, that Boss and I, when I am quiet and let him be right, so instead I asked questions about the skinhead, and said thank you for taking me out here, it is perfect—because that’s what he always does: he finds the best drama and brings it to me, like a cat brings a mouse to the front porch, when I have been a good secretary that week. It’s all that he knows how to do, and I know enough to be grateful for that.