May 18, 2014
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Forward Unto Dawn
Life is certainly interesting... Rae and I decided to keep an open friendship on Thursday. Here's how it happened...
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May 9th: We had the conversation about ending our relationship. There were still some questions and issues rolling around in my head, so we emailed back and forth a couple of times after that.
May 12th: She called me back to answer some questions I had and address some things I brought up in our emails. By the end of the conversation, I felt I'd exhausted every argument, pushed every issue I could to the max. I can't remember exactly how I ended up telling Mr. Hurley about what happened, but I did. We talked for a bit that night about everything, and I went to bed.
May 13th: Mr. Hurley Facebook messaged me in the morning and asked if I would mind if he talked to Rae just to get an explanation. I told him the go ahead, as long as it was in the context of imparting some Godly wisdom, not a Q&A session. So, they talked, apparently for a good bit, about everything, and he called me that night to give me the details. It ended up becoming like a junior high note passing exercise where she'd text him, he'd call me, and I'd tell him what to say back. It was like that only because we both wanted to respect the healing process. I'd told her I'd stop talking to her about it, and we both knew that we wouldn't be talking to each other anymore. Over the course of their conversation, she told him some things she'd told me before. She told him some things she hadn't told me before. The bottom line was that she really missed "her friend," and she didn't want to lose that. Through Mr. Hurley, I told her that I'd be open to continuing our friendship, and she told him she'd call me "soon" to talk about it.
May 14th: I'm on my way to trivia night at a local bar, and she texts me about a Facebook post I'd written (more on that later). She sent the message, but then the three little dots that mean she was still typing popped up for a while. I decided just to call her because I didn't want another super long, heavy text. It was then that I brought up continuing our friendship, and we talked about it while I was parked outside the bar. She talked about the healing process, and how she didn't want to lead me on. We talked about moving past our romantic relationship and what our friendship would look like. By the end of the conversation, we just agree to contact each other when we felt like it. We would extend invitations to hang out when we felt like it.
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So, why would I do this to myself? A couple of reasons...
1) The circumstances in which our relationship ended were not typical (for me). I think there was much more at work than Rae just not having that "feeling" whether she knew it or not. She told Mr. Hurley that she did think we were moving too fast, and that she made a mistake when she told me we weren't. I felt like had things moved slower and we'd developed a deeper friendship, things wouldn't have ended like they did. Plus, what girl wants to invest in a meaningful friendship with someone of the opposite sex, who lives two hours away, who she finds physically attractive, and only knows through a dating site? All that to say, I'm not sure how all this will go down. I'm not sure how much we will actually interact or what we'll actually do. I do know that building a strong friendship with her is something I wanted to do from the beginning, and hopefully my suspicions on why our relationship ended will be proven correct. If not, the worst thing that could happen is she finds someone else, and if that happens, our interaction will fade away anyway. If she started dating someone else, she'd start talking and hanging out with him more and more, and I wouldn't have to see it because of the distance between us.
2) I need to focus on my job and getting ready to go back to school. Having Rae's friendship (with the hopes of maybe more )in the background), I'll spend alot less time worrying about/investing time in finding someone else. My life is going to completely change in August, and there's no sense in dragging in another girl into the picture now when things are so up in the air. I had someone special in Rae, and it was awesome. I want someone special in my life now, but that's just not smart now. A friendship with Rae would allow me to slowly build on something that might happen with a person who is great anyway without the baggage of explaining to someone new everything that's happened in my life and weathering the storm of change that will come in the Fall.
