July Throwback – He’s Different

So I’ve met someone new!

I’d like to put a disclaimer first saying this post is just about acknowledging and celebrating his differences, not a declaration of he’s the one. I’m not that delusional. (It’s only been a couple of weeks, let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet).

I would also suggest to others not to compare your current suitors to boys of your past but since when does anyone ever follow their own advice?

So what does my new guy do that the others haven’t?

First, he’s not afraid to call them ‘dates’! We’re not just hanging out, not staying in, and not just grabbing food. It’s a date. In the past, I’ve avoided saying the word ‘date’ because I was worried it would freak the guy out a little bit. It’s very refreshing that he’s so comfortable with the word and the concept.

So I’ve been on a quite a few dates. Enough dates that I started avoiding meal dates and would purposely try to plan activities like bowling and mini golf. So I’ve done most date activities by now and it’s pretty difficult to surprise and impress me. He did both.

First off, he actually planned them himself! This has never happened to me before. It’s always been a back and forth of naming a few suggestions that are of equal distance between our two locations, then narrowing them down. Then I pick the day and give some options for the time we should meet up. It’s a very long process and some guys were so passive that it was like pulling teeth trying to figure out a place that we would actually both enjoy.

Secondly, there’s usually the waiting game of when you can ask about the next date because you’d don’t want to come off as too available and desperate. He doesn’t play games. Monday night he asks me if I have plans for Saturday and when I say no he says great because he has a surprise. He plans TWO different date options in different envelops allowing me to read both once he’s picked me up from my house and pick the one I want to go to that night. AND both options were activities I had never done before, which honestly must have been a stroke of luck. I was so impressed with the planning, the originality and creativity of the date ideas that were able to surprise me!

The final way in which he is different so far stems from his dislike of small talk. He likes to explore new topics and talk about interesting things. He’s also not afraid to talk about uncomfortable topics. You know how you steer away from your insecurities and issues for the first month or three (lol) of dating to make sure they like your positive attributes first before learning about your difficult traits? That didn’t happen with us. If you’ve read along with my blog over the past few months then you’ve heard me mention my intimacy and abandonment issues.

Well, somehow they came up during our first date and he asked me about them so we’re pretty bare to each other already. I appreciated that he didn’t shy away from the hard stuff even if I hadn’t been planning on talking about it for a while. We’re going to be jumping into this already knowing the deep secrets you usually hide. And it actually made our second date a lot easier.

Usually, I’m anxious thinking about the things I haven’t told my suitors yet, wondering if they’ll view me differently after, or if they’ll think it’s too much work to put up with. Instead, I could be fully honest with him. I didn’t have to think about how I was going to avoid the whole truth without lying or think about how I would tell him the full story later on. And there were more and more things he got to learn about me because I wasn’t so worried about being judged.

So he’s different and I like it. And I’m curious to see more of his differences and were that takes us.