Now I'm not a person who actually gets asked out on dates, and actually can't even remember the last time I had anything even resembling a date, but lately I've been thinking about dating and the various ways that people meet and fall in love. When you meet someone on-line or go on a blind date, you go into the experience with all these expectations of "Mr. Ideal" and it's easy to write the person off when they don't possess all the qualities you have in your head that you are looking for. I truly is a job interview of sorts, the job being "husband". When you meet someone in a different context, at work, school, on the street, you don't have a preconceieved label for them in mind already. You take your time, you get to know them slowly and fully and a relationship of definition forms on its own (acquaintance, boyfriend, friend, strange guy I'll never talk to again, etc.).
Patience truly is a virtue. I know I am sometimes guilty of looking for labels and not for people. I'm guilty of having an ideal in my head that I'm starting to realize isn't that important to me. There is a new book out called "The Year of Yes" where this woman decided that for a year she would go out with every man who asked, no matter what. Now granted this woman got asked out more times in this one year than I'll be asked out in a lifetime, but the concept is intriquing. I haven't read the book yet, but apparently she did end up marrying one of the guys she normally would have rejected "on spec". I wonder sometimes if the quest for Mr. Ideal causes us to lose our open mind about people. We stop looking at people as a whole person and instead section them out into "things we like about them" and "things we don't like about them" categories, instead of remembing how they make us feel. The older I get the harder the struggle between practicality and emotion becomes. It's a fight to think less and feel more. I just hope its worth it in the end.....
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