I was just realizing the other day that this Friday (July 29th) will mark the 5th anniversary of my return from the mission field. Crazy, huh? When time starts to feel like its moving by pretty quickly sometimes its nice to look back at what all can happen in 5 years and then it does feel like its flying by quite so fast as you see all thats happened in 5 years.
With that in mind, I wanted to put together a few categorical thoughts and maybe some statistics to see what all I've been up to in the last 5 years.
Dating
Lets start here since it seems as though this is all that anyone really cares about anyway. Lets start at the very beginning with Tawni. Who is she?, you ask. Well even I know very little about her. She was in one of my two Institute classes that I took my first semester back -- Preparing for Celestial Marriage. At the time I thought it might be something I'd need in the short term, but hey it never hurts to be prepared way in advance, right?
Anyway, she's very good-looking and friendly, and as the gung-ho RM that I was, I went for it. I called to ask her out. I assume that I got her number off the UofU Student Directory, b/c I'm sure I didn't ask her for it. She happened to be busy, but invited me to come and eat dinner at the restaurant where she was working as a server -- Christopher's in Bountiful. It was pretty convenient for me since I had a class at the Bountiful extension at the time, but little did I know that Christopher's is a pretty pricey place to eat. I sat down and started looking at the menu and pretty much everything was $20 or so, if I remember correctly. In the end I got some kind of chicken salad that was fairly reasonably priced, but I was glad that I wasn't taking some girl there on a date. She was my server, but was pretty busy, so our interaction was limited.
As a follow-up, I think I called her not too long after that and asked her out on a date, which she agreed to. I called her the night before just to verify that we were still on and got this response, "Oh, was that tomorrow? I've already got plans." A luau of some sort, I believe. Anyway, that was the first time I got the insensitve shoot down, but sadly, not the last.
I followed up the Tawni experience with the Mimi experience. She was a girl who I'd met at the Institute building and made friends with. We actually went on a couple dates, I got up the courage to actually kiss a girl for only the second time in my life, and the first since I'd been home, and even exchanged Christmas gifts, although I think she got me something in response to my getting her something. We went out on New Year's which happened to be a Sunday that year, and was one of two New Year's in my life on which I've actually had someone to kiss. Shortly after New Year's things got weird and she was "busy" a lot on the weekend. So we drifted apart, almost for good, although I did get a weird Valentines day call from her that went as follows:
Me: Hello?
Her: Hi, this is Mimi, I just wanted to call and say "Happy Valentine's Day."
Me: Oh, thanks. Happy Valentine's Day to you.
Her: Hey, my sister needs to use the phone, so I guess I'll talk to you later.
How bizarre is that?
Anyway, needless to say, I ended up going out with her two more times, first in March when I needed a date to the G-ville Old Folks Sociable, and later in April or May to see Camelot at the U, after I'd called her to wish her happy birthday. Later she left on a mission without mentioning to me that she was even thinking about going. I've seen her since a few times and actually had one decent conversation with her.
That was the end of that experience, and made me think that perhaps DTR's aren't entirely bad, if it means that you at least have some clue of what is going on in someone else's head.
The Mimi era was followed shortly by the Sandy era, a girl from my ward who I asked out and had a good time with, who I invited to the Manti pageant, an experience which prompted my friends to say that they thought she was pretty interested in me, only to find out about a month later that she was engaged to some other guy.
After a brief hiatus from dating, I began dating Angie, an experience whose full details would take more space than perhaps exists on the internet, but sufficeth to say that we had a lot of good times and a lot of bad times, and a lot of time all around, at least from my perspective. After numerous break-ups instigated by myself, and numerous times of her taking me back, finally we had a mutual breakup which seemed to stick. All told, the time between our first and last dates spans approximately 18 months, and includes approximately 5 breakups, and one hiatus of probably 10 months or so.
Aside from these major landmarks, there have been a couple other girls that I have kissed, and maybe one or two that I have been on second dates with. Let it be known, however that no girl who has gone out with me more than twice has ever gotten married, at least not yet. So lets assume that means that once you've dated Jake, there's just no getting over him.
Currently, there are a few girls that I'm thinking about asking out, but have not.
I think this is a good place to take a break, but check back later today or tomorrow for more of my multi-part retrospective on the post-mission era of Jake.
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