A Piece About Love

If you’re under the age of 20 and think you’ve found “the one”, the odds are you’re probably wrong.  I do, however, have a handful of friends from high school who would prove that theory terribly wrong.  So it IS possible…just in a way that Narnia is possible.  I also have friends who are over the age of 30 still searching for their perfect lobster of wonderful.  I look back at my track record and find myself in hysterical stitches of awe with how many times I had found ‘the one’.  Whenever I asked my mom for advice, she gave that recorded, overheard, cliché answer:  You just know, Jen.  Yeah, okay, mom.

Maybe it’s just me but I wouldn’t recommend running around telling  teenagers they’ll just feel something.  I’ve been in a room full of 15 year old girls and a Ouija board.  Bitches be crazy.   It’s like asking a girl to raise her hand when she thinks she has finally become a woman.  Now?  How about now?  You get it.

I thought I found the one when I was in 5th grade.  #fact   He played soccer. I played soccer. We were on the same swim team.  And then one day he asked out another girl on the team when I wasn’t at the pool.  She was my friend so she obviously said yes.  This is also my origin story of FOMO.  I mean, look what happens when you aren’t around!  Cut to the next time I found the one before I was broken up with via a Disneyworld postcard from family vacation.  Yeah.  That happened.

Let’s fast forward to the time my boyfriend of two years took me to Cracker Barrel for Valentine’s Day where there is a serious lack of a liquor license and alcohol of any kind.  He enjoyed his country steak while I sat there sipping on my concentrate apple juice trying to be content with the fact that he took me out at all, cause that’s nice, right?  As if the night hadn’t reached a pinnacle of awful, I was then dropped off at my apartment so that he could get back to his in time for a beer pong tournament.  Red solo cups 1, Jen 0.  Such a shame that never worked out.  For the record, when he and I would leave my house, my mother would cry in my ear telling me I could do so much better.  Cheers for looking out Lakme’ (that’s my mother’s name and I will go into much more detail on the ridiculous that is this woman at a later time).

And, for the record, I’m aware that VDay is a completely commercialized basically bullshit holiday.  I’m sure St. Valentine (whichever of three the day is actually intended for because no one knows), while honored, is baffled how his name became associated with rose petals, hearts, and expensive dinners.  Especially since this day is apparently associated with a fertility ritual in which women put their names in an urn after being painted with the blood of a sacrificial goat (sexy rexy).  Men picked a name to find their match.  It was like the bachelorette minus Chris Harrison.  But yeah, CUPCAKES FOR EVERYONE!!

Then let’s go to the time I was eating lunch one day and found out that my sorority sister’s friend and I WERE DATING THE SAME PERSON!  Good times.  And that’s the night I drank 2 Hairy Bears and ended up dancing around Alpha Phi with two breasts of chicken on a fork while screaming “there’s no smoking in the mansion!”.  If you do not know what a Hairy Bear is, please make a trip to to Bloomington, IN and experience it for yourself.  It’s a game changer.  I recommend a sugar packet and a full stomach.

And then, last but not least, the time I was told that I could pursue my dreams in the entertainment industry in Grand Rapids, MI.

****crickets and the sound of broken dreams****

This is only a smidgen of the blooper reel that was my dating life.  Fortunately and miraculously, I’ve now found what I consider to be something pretty magical and something, for quite some time, I wasn’t convinced was ever gonna be a part of my story.  We literally bumped into eachother in a pool in Palm Springs.  Maybe it was the 122 degree heatwave and the fact that it was so hot I was seeing mirages on top of my vodka sodas, but as Rhianna sings, we fell in love in a hopeless place.  Not then and there, obviously.  It took time.  He wasn’t what I expected.  It wasn’t love at first sight.  We didn’t see eachother from across the pool and fall into some Romeo and Juliet trance oblivious to the world around us knocking things over as we found our way into eachothers arms.  It was more like he bumped into me with his hot pink raft and I turned around and told him to watch where he was going.  You know, just like I always dreamed it would happen.

I will never claim to be any kind of expert on anything, especially matters of the heart but I will say if you ever have to question where you stand in someone’s life, you’ve already found your answer.  If you aren’t getting what you ultimately and honestly want from someone-NEXT!!   If you find yourself hanging on to someone that doesn’t seem to ever need to hang on to you – NEXT!!  If you feel discontent or that you aren’t 100% yourself  or like you’re constantly staring at your phone waiting to hear from them or if you have to write several rough drafts before sending a simple text message – NEXT!!

You will find the one.  And it’ll be different.  Your heart will be at ease and it will be much simpler than you could have ever imagined.  It’s hard to explain.  And so it turns out my mother was right.  You just know.