Category: Dating

Beach Glass Dating

Beach Glass Dating

Walking along the beach at the Lake today, it occurred to me that learning how to date post-forty has been a bit like looking for beach glass.

When I was little we used to go to North Myrtle Beach on the South Carolina coast twice a year. My mother and I would walk up and down the beach, along the shoreline, and I learned to look for shark’s teeth from her.

For years, I collected shells I liked – buckets of them, while she brought home a few black slivers of shark’s teeth.

Now I walk along the Lakeshore looking for beach glass – those small pieces of broken glass the waves have tumbled into smoothness. They come in brown, a milky white, green, and very rarely, deep blue.

It takes the same kind of effort I learned from my mother – a kind of concentration that gradually trains your eyes to notice a particular difference in the assortment of small stones that blanket the Lakeshore.

Online dating can be overwhelming (particularly when dating has meant years of famine). At first, I said yes to meeting anyone who was not a clear “No!” And that was good. I began to understand what questions I needed to ask, what kinds of things I needed to look for.

But it’s not all about knowing what you want. So often I catch a glimpse of green in the water only for a wave to cover it as quickly as it had revealed it.

It’s hard. So many times the possibilities of a promising date are unexplored because of timing and circumstances. Though of course, it’s also timing and circumstances that have revealed possibilities where I never thought to find them.

The analogy breaks down (they always do). I’m not collecting dates. I’m looking for a unique relationship with a partner.

But I am doing my best to collect the gifts the dates bring me.

I don’t mean literal gifts – the only two first dates I would consider unmitigated disasters included gifts. (Online dating tip: don’t show up to your first meeting with a copy of your self-published self-help book, and don’t spend the whole time talking about the special insight and technique you’ve developed to address every kind of emotional struggle. Book pitches do not work well as dates.)

Everyone I’ve met has given me a gift, though. Always the gift of time and conversation at the least, but most often, also the gift of something of their life and self and story.

There was the man whose long struggle with brain cancer ended in a miraculous cure. (His marriage survived the illness but not the cure, and he still longed for his wife.)

The former Benedictine Monk who decided final vows were not for him, and seemed to be making up for his decades in black with some of the most colorful business clothes I’ve seen on a man.

The black attorney who loved scuba diving and really wanted to go to seminary.

The pastor who’d started his career with the Chicago Police Department so young that his mother had to sign his gun permit, and then quit a few years shy of his retirement eligibility because his church needed him.

They each gave me something – often questions about life and what it means. Sometimes realizations. Sometimes affirmation. I hope I gave them similar gifts in return.

And while I don’t collect dates, I do collect the gifts they’ve brought me – like sparkling beach glass.

Love and Longing

Love and Longing

By the time I was fourteen, most of my friends were college students.

I grew up on a university campus, sort of a fundamentalist Baptist enclave. The school had an elementary and high school as well as the college, and I graduated from all three.

From third grade on, I was what I now think of as the class scapegoat – my classmates cast all their fears upon me and drove me outside the camp. At best, I felt tolerated.

My seventh grade year I struck up an unlikely friendship with a junior who was new to the school. We both read through lunch hours, and soon found ourselves reading through our lunches companionably together. When she graduated, my social world moved with her to the university.

I will always be grateful to those college theater majors who welcomed an awkward teenager in and never made me feel like an outsider.

And of course, I had crushes on most of the guys. Talented, good looking college men who were more than kind to me – what teenager wouldn’t?

I was so full of longing.

Romantic longing, yes. But also longing for affirmation, for belonging. Longing to be seen – not to be invisible. Longing to be valued for who I was, not just tolerated out of obligation.

My longing, however innocent, was deep. And good. Longing tells us we’re alive to the world.

I remember sitting in the kitchen at some point in those years, talking to my mother about it. I’d realized that a crush was about who I wanted someone to be, rather than who they really were. If I wanted to get beyond a crush, I was going to need to really get to know them and love them.

We only ever get to love someone for who they are, where they are.

Love may come to see possibilities, may hope for more for someone (or even with them), but it can only live in the present. In the reality of here, now.

I’d like to say I’ve gotten good at it, thirty years later. That it’s easier.

Those years have certainly given me lots of practice, and it’s become, at least to some degree, part of who I am.

But if anything, it’s only gotten more complex. Loving doesn’t always diffuse the longing. Sometimes they coexist, and often in circumstances that make that coexistence less than comfortable. Sometimes they are even intertwined.

I still try, though. I still think about it. And with every date, every encounter, I try to own my longings and let loving surpass them.

It never quite feels the same. Sometimes the longings rage with the power of a summer storm over the Lake. Other times they are more like my cat when I wake him up in the morning – sleepily insistent on making his presence known.

Loving means listening to something other than the longings. Or more accurately, someone. We only really get to love someone for who they are, where they are.

That listening is so hard, and I get it wrong. I wish I were better at it than I am most of the time, but I keep trying. I hope the trying shows.

And even when I think I’m doing it well, there’s probably nothing in my life that’s harder. To let loving surpass longing – oh, dear God, it hurts sometimes.

But I keep choosing it. For the first date that will not turn into a second, as well as for the relationship that is developing. For the attraction I cannot return as much as for the one not returned to me. For all the possibilities that won’t be.

I do not believe that the love I give, whether it’s returned or not, whether it’s even spoken, has ever diminished me.

It hasn’t diminished my longing either.

Goodbye and Hello

Goodbye and Hello

When I was 25, like so many other young evangelicals in the ’90s, I kissed dating goodbye.

Of course, it was a bit easier since I’d never been on a date.

I was a late bloomer to put it gently. From elementary school on I was a social pariah with my peers. By Jr. High, I was spending my free time with college students (fundamentalist Baptist theater majors, to be more precise), and by the time I was actually in college and at a reasonable dateable age, I was firmly ensconced as the kid sister.

When I was 25, I struck up a conversation with a guy I knew slightly at an outing for my singles group from church. We ended up talking that whole evening, and after spending several more group outings in a similar fashion, we had a conversation. He’d been married before and divorced, and he wanted to do things differently — he wanted to do courtship instead of dating.

Courtship meant you didn’t do things one-on-one unless marriage was in the offing. The man asked the girl’s parents for permission to court her. And nothing physical — not even a kiss.

I was all in. The idea that one should take these things seriously appealed to me. I had been explicitly taught, “Don’t go on a first date with anyone you wouldn’t marry — then you won’t have to break their heart and yours down the line.” My parents have lots of wisdom, and maintaining a conversation with them as a part of the process made sense.

And other than telling him that, no way was my first kiss going to be the public one on my wedding day! (a compromise he agreed to), I was content to honor the physical boundaries.

(In retrospect, most people miss how bone-melting holding hands can be when you’re not wondering how far you can get away with — or he will try — going.)

We courted for an intense three months until he showed up for our Valentine’s date and broke up with me, glad “things hadn’t gone too far.”

For him maybe.

I was blindsided. When he showed up for the date and asked if we could go for a walk, I was honestly thinking, “Well, I know we’ve covered money and kids and all the important stuff, but it’s really too soon for him to propose!”

A few years later and a second relationship ended, I did some counseling with a pastor who told me, “I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but you really need to learn how to casual date.”

It was so true. While the courtship model was intended to honor men and women and help them take romantic relationships seriously, for me it gave a first date the weight of near-engagement. I had to be fully invested from the start, just getting to know someone, and the results were devastating me.

It took well over a decade for me to find a context where I could learn to “casual date.” Evangelical churches and seminary contexts are so messed up on dating that approaching it casually is nigh to impossible. And it was particularly so for me — it’s hard to take a first date lightly when you’re only being asked out once every couple of years. Maybe.

I now realize that may have been because while I certainly belonged, I just as certainly didn’t fit the conservative evangelical contexts I was in.

I made my own chance a few years ago when, after being affectionately bullied into it by a friend, I dove into online dating. There’s nothing like ten first dates in three weeks to help you learn to take a first date lightly!

I decided to say yes to meeting anyone whose profile didn’t scream (or whisper) “Absolutely not!” and give myself the chance to be surprised. I found I could take the person seriously while taking the date lightly. And I found that men who hadn’t been raised in an evangelical culture tended to be more emotionally and relationally mature (though there are always exceptions going both directions).

I kissed dating hello, and I began to understand how to enter a story without needing to know what the ending could or should be.

For more stories about “Life After I Kissed Dating Goodbye” see http://www.lifeafterikdg.com/

An Open Door 99 Floors Up

An Open Door 99 Floors Up

It was a first date. We’d never met, but I recognized him from his picture as he waited for me across the street from the L station. It was early December, before sunset, and we were meeting downtown to look at Christmas lights after he finished his shift.

The streets were crowded with shoppers, the Christmas decorations sparkled and twinkled, and we were hitting it off. I liked his deep, resonant voice and we talked in an easy rhythm. He was tall, black Irish with broad shoulders, and there was a spark in his eye I liked.

When he offered to show me the skyscraper where he worked as a building engineer, I was game.

I love these buildings that hold up the sky — I always have. When I walk the city canyons at their feet, they make me breathe deep and feel tall (all 5’2″ of me). I’ll probably never get over walking around like a tourist downtown with my head turned to the sky.

We got in one elevator to take us up to the building management office, and after he picked up some keys, another took us higher.

The 99th floor was filled with machinery bigger than my apartment — all the guts of the building, rumbling away. As we walked around the huge space, he guided me to an ordinary door, turned the key in its lock, and opened a door to the glory of the city at dusk.

The sky was pink and dark purple, and the city glittered with lights. As I leaned out into the view, I could feel a surprisingly warm breeze embrace me. There was nothing between me and the city and sky but the wind.

It was a door to nowhere that opened into maybe the biggest view I’d ever seen. In the end, there were four of them, one on each outer wall of the building, each of them with a completely different but equally spectacular view.

I didn’t have to go up those elevators with him on our first date, and I surely didn’t have to lean out each of those doors. There was obvious risk. But I did go up, and I did lean out, and I saw things I’d never seen before, and I saw familiar things from an entirely new perspective. I felt a wind that I’ll never feel again – the warm wind that embraces the highest floors of that building.

I’ll never forget what it felt like to stand in an open door 99 floors up with nothing between me and the world but the wind.

I’ll never forget what it felt like to lean out into the risk and the beauty. To breathe it all in and feel my world expand to fill it. To hold the impossible fullness of it all.

We talked for over eight hours of walking and eating and more walking that night, but I’m not sure I ever really stopped leaning out into that wind.