For analytical types, making a significant decision can be
an agonizing struggle with points and counterpoints, small considerations and
large speculations, long lists of pros and cons and even a middle column for
things worth mentioning that may very well be a neutral. When Bill and I were moving to a more serious
place in our dating relationship, we both paid the price our analytical natures
exact. For Bill, it meant reopening his
still-active online dating account and taking one last look at the women he had
already communicated with, checking to see if anyone else seemed compelling
enough to halt the forward motion he was making with me. He later told me that it settled his heart to
see how no one could even spark a little bit of interest when he compared them
to me. I was flattered, and happy to be
with someone who understood the gravity of giving your heart to someone. The same thing happened to me when a good
friend suddenly got interested in exploring if we could be “something more,”
and I was left weighing a 3-year relationship against the 3-month one I had
formed with Bill. One seemed a steady
known quantity, the other, a wild gamble.
Well, you all know I took the wild gamble, which really wasn’t so wild
after all. I couldn’t have told you then
how much I would come to love Bill,
but I could tell it was totally worth it to me to find out. (With my whole heart, to the moon and back,
it turns out)
But in those early days those options are real. And narrowing the choices felt hard. Watching your life of seemingly limitless
possibilities funnel onto one path
with one person, effectively removing countless other exciting and interesting
options, was a struggle for this single girl who had been free-wheeling it
longer than most . How could I ever be
truly sure that this was the exact right person to marry, about whom I would
have no misgivings or regrets? How could
I skip ahead to the end of the story and see if I liked the ending (or even the
middle 20 chapters, for that matter) before I decided to buy the book and make
it my own life story? The truth is, I
simply couldn’t. It is a leap of faith
to read a few chapters of someone’s life, share of few of your own, and decide
to be rebound into one volume of a story merged forever for better or
worse. You pray the “worse” won’t be the worst you could possibly imagine and
the” better” feels more like the best, and then you live. And work.
And pick up the pen every day and try to make the book the one you’d
want to read if you were looking for a love story of epic proportions, a life
of grand adventures, and simple pleasures smoothing the bumpy parts all along
the way.
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