I Deserve What I Want and Am Willing To Wait For It

A good friend of mine just got engaged and it got me thinking, what are things that we search for in potential mate?

To answer this question I asked some friends and here are some of their responses.

• I don’t actually look for anything! Every person I have dated has been very distinctive and unique, no preference for looks, height, weight, race whatever. The only things that are genuinely important are honesty, the ability to be his own person independent of the relationship, and an active mind.
• I notice kindness, humor, and passion above all other qualities. I don’t always look for them per say, but when someone has them, they don’t go unnoticed by me and those are the people who tend to keep my company.
• Not a fuck up.
• As un-bro as possible. Not just the absence of frat-ishness, but as un-frat as possible. An anti-bro, if you will.
• Money.
• Mammal.
• Honesty, humor, kindness, doing things for others because they can/ want to help not because they have to or just to make a buck.
• I like a guy who is engaging. I have the most fun when we can bounce stories off one another because theirs reminds you of something and vice versa. If I’m doing all the talking I am going to assume you are boring/have had nothing happen to you ever. I also enjoy when a guy is honest. None of the games depicted in every rom-com ever. He knows what he means and he says it. Pretty much a male version of myself.
• Someone who can be your best friend that you wanna smother with kisses and bring home to mom and grandma. Someone who takes pride in his work, appearance, and his woman.
• A sense of humor, compassion, and intelligence. There’s a great quote I’ve seen that was Joanne Woodward talking about Paul Newman “Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that’s a real treat”
• Honesty, loyalty, and dedication to family.

I know every one of these people and I enjoyed reading their responses, mostly because, while they don’t see what I see in them, the perfect mate they all described were words and adjectives I would use to describe them. While we don’t want someone who is our exact opposite we look in a mirror almost everyday and we know what we like. We want someone who compliments us, challenges us, and makes us better. Now, you might look at the responses of “money” and “mammal” and think how could that possible remind you of that person but that is the beauty of knowing them. Its perfect and not in a bad way. All these answers were perfect fit for each other this people. So I started making my list.

Intelligent, funny, loves my friends, doesn’t mind hanging with my family, spontaneous, sometimes lazy, and the biggest thing not embarrassed by me. I want a guy who isn’t afraid to say that I am his women and want to show me off. On that flip side, I want a man who I would not be embarrassed by and want to show off. I want a guy who knows how to keep a conversation going, likes to drink, but on a Friday would love to go to happy hour and then stay in and watch Hawaii Five-O instead of going out. I do want someone who is my best friend. I deserve what I want and I am willing to wait for it.

As Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt from Parks and Recreation know, you want someone who you love and like.

Sharing My Space

I have been to two family weddings in the last year. Both have been amazing and special. It’s always amazing to see two people you care about start a new chapter in their lives. While I was watching the ceremony during the most recent one I started thinking, “Will I ever do that?”

At first I thought maybe it’s because I don’t think I will find someone but that’s really not it. It’s really about if I want too. Whether it’s my parents getting ready to celebrate their 25th anniversary together or my aunt and uncle  who just celebrated their 40th it still blows my mind that after that amount of time you can still adore someone. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you what I am going to be feeling next week much less that I will feel the same way about someone 30 years from now. Now I know that marriage is by no means easy and this isn’t me avoiding it because it because I think it will be too hard but there is a small part of me that says, “Why bother?” Marriage definitely seems like a lot of work and add children and it gets 100 times harder. When my parents fight I have those thoughts of why bother, but then we watch their wedding video or they eat dinner out on the deck together or my father kisses my mother on the forehead and that’s when I see it. The love they have for each other. That’s why you do it. Love.

Choosing to voluntarily share your emotions, fears, aspirations, and dreams with someone sounds so scary. I mean, heck I can’t even share the same space with a friend or emotions with a therapist, how am I expected to share them with someone I haven’t known my whole life?! No thank you. Count me out. I won’t do it…

But them I see my parents eating dinner together, watch their wedding video or my father kisses my mother on the forehead and that’s when I remember why I want to do it. I have always valued my space, emotionally and physically. The instant I can voluntarily share those with someone will be the day I say yes. Learning how to be the real me and share that with someone is something I will have to work on but it seems like the effort will be worth the reward.

 

This post is dedicated to all the couples in my family. The newly formed ones, the mature ones, and the future ones. You all inspire me.

Guest Writer: Who Said I Was An Adult?! I Want Names!

It seems as though everyone and their mother (and grandmother and grandfather and second and third cousins) is writing articles on what it means to be a twenty-something.  As though the decade where you hit many major life rites of passage can be described in a twenty-something list of .gifs, vines and memes.  I have chuckled at and shared many of these articles.  I watch old episodes of Friends and think “I’m just like these people,” searching for the funniest BuzzFeed I can find comparing myself to Chandler (As of course I am a Chandler).  I am practically screaming at the top of my internet lungs that I was born in the 1990s and remember all of these pre-internet things.  While this is all superficial and fun games I can’t help but wonder has the internet age of sharing created the more malicious implication of these posts—the urge to be an “adult?”

Every single time (EVERY. SINGLE. TIME) I get together for drinks/workouts/dinner with a friend the topic of marriage and babies comes up.  The dialogue usually involves something along the lines of “Did you see so-and-so procreate/got married?”  It then quickly turns into either a “they are the last people on earth who should be trusted with another human life,” or a “what-the-actual-explicative is wrong with me?”  It’s as though the constant updates from people who in the past I wouldn’t have given a second thought after graduation has created a form of self-doubt that psychologists will study in the future and mark as the moment humanity collectively lost its mind.  I spend an inordinate amount of time reminding myself that I shouldn’t be jealous that Kathy bought a house, I don’t even know where I want to live yet! (Related: I’m 24 years old—I shouldn’t be buying a house!)

When did everyone come to the decision that they wanted to grow up so fast?  I relate to the characters on Friends and they’re in their late 20s when the show BEGINS.  This means that they are a decade ahead of me in years but I have this unrealistic expectation that I too should be knee-deep in my career and family life.  I shouldn’t.  I am not.  I am not and I shouldn’t be.  I am exactly where I should be in life.  I graduated college and went on to a Master’s program right away.  I acted as a Teaching Assistant and had the weirdest experience of having to be an authority figure to people who were just like I was 3 months prior.  I thought back to my experience with Teaching Assistants my freshman year of college at the University of Nebraska before I transferred to a university where all my professors had their doctorate in what they taught (Thanks for being worth my money, Mary Washington!).  The TAs always were either ridiculously hard or so laid back and awesome.  Which one they were differed based upon whether they saw themselves as an “adult” or not.

I didn’t understand it at the time, but it was either acceptance of the weirdness of their situation or overcompensation. The hard TAs were basically saying, “I feel insecure in my position of authority over you so I’m going to ruin your life,” or I imagine that was what it was anyway.  I spent so much time trying to be “professional” that I think I was actually unavailable to the students—which is the exact opposite of what an educator should do.  Then I became a tutor for the athletic department and in my first semester was so formal in my correspondence that I ended up having a lot of students stand me up (which isn’t as bad as it sounds because I still got paid!).  The second semester I realized that if I texted them instead of emailed them they might actually show up, listen to me and learn, because guess what—just like me they were twenty-something’s who are attached to their phone like it’s a good luck charm.  Once I stopped trying to be an “adult,” I actually was able to do my job.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t make mistakes along the way, because I did.  There’s a great story about one of the students I tutored giving me his post-game Gatorade because I ran into him after I had personally drank a gallon of alcohol.  All this means is that I shouldn’t have tried so hard to fit into this definition of what it means to be an “adult.”  I don’t know what an adult is, honestly.  But if it means having a home-loan and babies and husbands at the young age of 24 then I never want to grow up.  I barely know who I am.  I eat candy for breakfast sometimes.  I stay up until 3 A.M. for no reason.  These are not things that adults do but they are things that I am supposed to be doing.  I work a crappy job for crappy pay and have not yet reached my goal of becoming a Men’s College Basketball coach and that is entirely okay.  If being married and having kids is what you want to be doing at 24, then do it.  If it’s not, just remember Chandler and Monica were in their 30s before they got married and half of marriages end in divorce.

Sara is a currently working a crappy job for crappy pay in Virginia. Some of my fondest memories are hanging out with her during our college years. When she does decide to become an adult the world better watch out cause she is going to take it by storm.