Dear Readers,
I apologize for the ridiculous amount of time that has passed since our last encounter. I wish I could tell you that I was off on a thrilling adventure, or too busy taking my own advice and falling in love, but to avoid blatantly lying through my teeth I might as well tell you that I just so happened to be doing a whole lot of nothing. It was sheer laziness with a hint of preservation of my own vulnerability that has kept my typing hands locked away for hours upon end. Although I don’t think much of what I would have written would have been too helpful these last few months due to some rather “confusing” and “thought-consuming” controversies I had been processing through on love. But I LOVE to keep you guessing as you already know so we will just have to watch that one unravel a bit later.
Where do I start today? Well currently, I am bloated, sweaty, and a bit on the stinky side after a wonderful but deodorant testing weekend at Dana Point with my leadership team. The humidity was rather unwelcoming and left my hair with a parting favor of frizz and grease. As much fun as I did have though, I would have to say it was rather worth it. Here I am, 21-years-old, starting what is supposed to be one of the most thrilling years of a girl’s life and I’m sitting typing away living in some fantasy land of boundaries, how-to’s, and what not to do’s.
You know, one thing I have taken away from this summer (among several of course), is that perhaps being your faithful dating advisor is that I am entirely out of the loop when it comes to really putting my stuff into practice. Next Saturday I will be standing in a wedding of two incredible individuals, pouring their hearts out for one another and glorifying the Lord in the union of their commitment to one another for life. How beautiful is that? The crazy thing is that one of the main reasons I have received such an honor of standing near the bride is due to her utilizing much of what I stand for and write in her relationship with her fiancé. She is getting married! Hello...I mean if someone else can put it to such good use than what on earth am I doing wrong?
To be honest…quite a lot. Two summers ago I was an idiot. I fell for someone entirely unrealistic and it landed me in a downward spiral of questioning and over-analyzing that no woman should, yet all women do bare. Why do we do that to ourselves? We spend so much energy telling ourselves that we should “just let it go”, “he isn’t the one”, “wait for Mr. Perfect”. We find every excuse in the world to somehow protect ourselves from physical imperfections to terrible relationships with their mothers and yet the more time we spend so enthralled by convincing ourselves out of something we wind up smack dab in the middle of falling in flove!
*Flove (Fake Love): Our idealistic, over-dramatized concept of what love should be based off of chick flicks, Nicholas Sparks, and Taylor Swift
Don’t get me wrong, I believe that love should be an experience that truly flourishes and grows daily, but for some reason I have all these silly preconceptions of how it SHOULD be. Then I end up scaring myself out of any opportunity of it as a result of not even knowing what a real, genuine love looks like. Take my parents for example, their love has lasted several years and is one of the best representations of a relationship I hope to one day model, but I never got to see how it all began. No one has ever told me how it all is supposed to begin? Perhaps because it isn’t SUPPOSED to begin any sort of way, it just does.
You know, as I write this book I feel like the biggest piece of advice I could give a girl is not to follow my example of how I lived, but how to take the wisdom I gained from my mistakes without having to experience the mistakes herself. The problem is that for each individual those mistakes will appear different. I can advise and counsel and work through situations with each person that asks me how to “solve” their relationship troubles, but that doesn’t change the fact that it will always be THEIRS.
So, what does that look like for me? I used to have this picture of a man pursuing me in a way that was so honest. I wanted someone to tell me straight up that they wanted to pursue me, I’m the kind of girl that needs that after what I’ve been through because honestly the whole actions speak louder than words thing for me is a bit tough to fathom these days. Actions can be entirely misinterpreted, but words can affirm or discourage in such a blatant way. That is why I need someone honest, because I trust words far more than what someone does. I know it is usually entirely opposite for people, but hey that is what my past situations have taught me.
A guy pursued me once though who said everything he felt, to the point of freaking me out because I was so taken back by the abruptness of it. I felt as though he was almost needy, or desperate, and ended up calling it quits after one or two dates. That is when I realized that I can have a beautiful concept of what I’m looking for in my head, but sometimes it comes in an entirely different way. I don’t let myself fall too easily these days, but at the same time once the walls are down it is pretty hard for me to build them back up. I’m starting to understand that I know less and less of what I thought I knew about how to be pursued and more and more about how to live in the mystery of it. I’ve learned that I enjoy the mysterious aspect of not fully knowing if someone is crushing on me or not, it is kind of fun! The problem is that any crush with no follow through is just that…a CRUSH.
Standing in between the tension of honesty and mystery has become one of the most challenging things for me as a woman. Mainly because I don’t believe it is my responsibility to blatantly throw out how I feel to someone, especially if their reciprocation of the feeling is in question. So then what? Wait? Be patient? All my life people have told me to wait and be patient. I can wait for hours and days and weeks and months and even years until the Lord makes it clear if or who or that there is a man for me, but what I am still asking is what am I to do while I wait? Now that is the real question.
--I’ll write soon,
Kendra
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