Friend #52 - Chris

I was walking back from lunch with a friend sometime in the spring of this year.  My friend was talking about being in love.  “When was the last time you were in love?” they asked.

I paused, thinking, trying to be honest with myself.  “I don’t know.  Maybe fifteen years ago?  But that may have been more obligation than love.  I’m not sure I’ve ever really been in love.”

My friend stopped walking and stared at me, mouth gaping open.  “I feel sorry for you.” 

There’s been a lot of times in my life that I’ve wondered if something is wrong with me.  I think I can be charming.  I think I can be well-liked.  But when it comes down to having a deep, personal relationship with anyone, I have been an absolute failure.  Mostly, I feel like the major relationships that have come into my life have cared about me for surface reasons and nothing more.  It has left me empty.

But the optimist in me never lets me give up.  It is the reason I continued to stay on the online dating hamster wheel.  And let’s be honest, I met a lot of good guys.  They just weren’t the right connection for me…which was frustrating.  I wanted someone to fit but I no longer needed someone to fit.  And after a while, dating is more tedious than it is fun.

I was sitting down with Friend #20 when I made a negative comment about my dating life.  “Oh, look at that,” Christine said.  “You just pushed love away.”  It pissed me off because I knew she was right.

So, I started working on my attitude about dating.  Things did not immediately get better but I kept trying to be positive.  I went on a lot more dates.  Nothing happened.  Then, somewhere around the middle of the year, I got a message from Chris online asking me out to dinner.  It was abrupt but I thought, “What the hell?  That’s what we are here for, right?”  So, I agreed.

I’d already gotten a lemon drop martini from the bar when he ambled in, five minutes late.  He was exactly my type.  He ordered a rum and Coke and we began to casually review the first date stats.  We are the exact same age.  We’ve both been married twice.  Neither of us have any children.  Our black and white dogs look like matching bookends.  He’s a business owner, a risk taker, and he has mischievous gray-green eyes that light up when he’s being silly.  We even share a love of a cocktails.

There was no magical feeling or romantic music that night.  To be honest, everything was pretty regular, but at the end of the night, I heard something in my brain click quietly, and I thought, “Does that mean something?” 

I’m not going to tell you this is a storybook romance.  We’ve fought and made up.  I’ve had a dear friend of mine who has had an ongoing health scare.  He’s been through some excruciating pain from a crushed disk in his neck.  There have been fights with coworkers, roommates and friends.  One time we were even rear-ended on the way to a concert. 

But there have also been unexpected moments like waiting in line together for the most famous BBQ in Phoenix, going to a Simon & Garfunkel concert only to realize it was a tribute band, or riding bicycles through Old Town Scottsdale on a Sunday afternoon.  Once, we stumbled upon an island in the middle of Lake Erie while we were in Ohio.  He fell into the lake and I almost peed my pants laughing.  If I live to be one hundred years old, I will always remember that day as one of the happiest days of my life. 

So is this love?  I’d like to think it is, yet I have no expectation on where it’s going.  I simply know I’m grateful for every moment I have with him.  I know my life feels infinitely better with him than it does without him.  He can be grumpy and a little rough around the edges but he also understands how to be kind.  And instead of relying on me to be the dominating force to stir up trouble, he’s a cyclone in his own right.  Every night, we curl up together on the couch to watch the news, not because it is so informative but because that’s where we decompress.  And it fits a happy compartment of my life that has been empty for far too long.

Sometimes, I think of the woman I was a year ago, sitting up in my bedroom alone watching television feeling lonely and I know I’m a different person today.  I opened my life to 52 new people looking to hear their stories and connect with them, but every time I walked away from someone new, I also took away a lesson.  It made me better.  It made me stronger.  Our community really is a patchwork quilt.  We can’t become the people we are meant to be without each other.  So why are we so afraid?  The people we walk shoulder to shoulder with every day are actually pretty spectacular.  None of my new friends were planned.  They all just walked into my life.

And if I can randomly meet 52 amazing people like the ones immortalized in these pages, then what is your excuse?