This post is part of an occasional series where we take a Trip Back in Time to relate stories and experiences that happened long before this site existed.
After my first date with Evan, I wasn’t sure what to think or how to feel. I really enjoyed talking with him over coffee that night, but it was a little awkward seeing him around campus. Evan had this tendency early on to act like he was best friends with whomever he met; joking around with them (sometimes making jokes about them) like they were friends for years. However, most people are not prepared to joke around like that with a new acquaintance. My friends were no exception.
My circle at that time consisted of about five girls and other than a brief stint of romance for one of them, we were all college singles with most of us never having had a boyfriend. Freshman year was all about being with the girls. We were all new so we banded together and formed bonds. However, by sophomore year my bond with the group started to bend and even break, as I was torn between being with my friends and being with my potential boyfriend. I had no idea how to balance both. My friends didn’t seem to like my choice, but even more didn’t want our group to change. Being with someone that you are unsure about and having friends who seem less than enthusiastic about the whole thing, make for unstable times.
And we weren’t even to our second date yet.
Instead of coffee and rubber bands, this time we attended “Antigone”, the school’s autumn play, and shared ice cream at Baskin Robbins afterward. We were talking about superficial things, when all of a sudden Evan steered the conversation to a more heart racing subject: marriage. Not that he asked me to marry him right then (he’s quick on the trigger, but not THAT quick), but rather, “Did I plan on getting married some day?” and “What did I look for in a spouse?” These were good questions, but supposedly, “we weren’t looking for a romantic relationship”.
That was’t really true though. It is just something you say on your first date to not come off as desperate and to provide an easy way out, should the date go badly. Still, for some odd reason we were sitting there on date number two discussing where this relationship was headed.[1. This was our first DTR, where you Define The Relationship. We had many of these.]
As a teenager, I compiled a list of character traits I would like to have in my future husband. The list included such traits as: being a strong Christian, showing kindness to others, and wanting children, etc. Evan possibly possessed some of these traits, but I did not know that at the time. Furthermore, I wasn’t really thinking of marriage yet. I awkwardly related these to Evan as we we finished our ice cream.
I then asked him in return what he looked for in a wife. I can’t remember now what he said, but I must have possessed some of the characteristics he mentioned, because he ended up making me his wife later on. In the course of the date, we decided to keep seeing each other and to discover together where this relationship might be headed. However, at this point we were still just going on dates and had made no official commitment to one another. We were not a couple.
In our next post as part of our Trip Back series, we have our first three-hour discussion (Read: fight) about whether or not to be together.
Related posts:
