It's all about the timing....

Thus began my foray into the world of online dating. I had some success, albeit short term. In February of 2003, I began dating a wonderful guy. We are still friends to this day, but weren't able to make the romantic relationship work after two years. It totally sucks to find someone with whom you have so much in common, yet the timing is just all wrong. We can both make each other laugh usually with just one word. I wish things could have ended differently for us, romantically, but I will never regret the time we had together. He is still one of my best friends, and I am still amazingly close to his family. They adopted me as their own when I moved away from home. As a small town girl in a big city, I was so happy to find pseudo-parents and pseudo siblings. Even though they never became official in-laws, they will always be a part of my family.

I have grown up so much since then. Some of it is just the natural progression of maturing with age, but I truly believe the experience taught me so much. I learned to trust again. With that, I gained back my ability to love with all my heart. Too many times, I think people break up and take their damaged selves right to the next relationship. It's all about healing, timing, and being emotionally available. If you don't take time to reflect on what went right and wrong in the past relationship, you are almost destined to make the same mistakes over and over.

After 3 long years, I finally broke back into the dating scene. Again, I turned to the online world. After a string of reallllllly bad first dates (which I will definitely write about in future posts) I finally met another good one. Ahhhh....the beginning of a relationship is so much fun. Learning about each other, not being able to get enough of each other...first kiss...sigh. We had a really fun courtship. Then, reality set in. I learned a lot in this relationship about being patient and being less selfish. For once, it wasn't all about me, and I was okay with that. This was also my first foray into dating someone with kids. Times went from bad to worse in the relationship. I was constantly feeling ignored, neglected, forgotten. Everytime I would confront him about it, things got better...for a while.

After over a year of ups and downs (more downs than ups, unfortunately) the relationship came to an end. The break up took 4, yes, 4 hours. I don't think I have ever before experienced the level of pain I felt that night. You know those scenes in the movies when someone closes a door and slides to the floor in tears? Yeah, that was me. I sat on the floor in my doorway for a good 20 minutes just sobbing. Once I finally got it together, I crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep. It seems again, that timing was a problem. In retrospect, even though we had so much in common and shared an eerily similar sense of humor, we really weren't a good match. He was not healed, he was not emotionally available, and he couldn't give me the type of love and affection that I require (unashamed of that!!).

Sigh...onward and upward.....still looking for that perfect timing!!