We Run Toward What Is Familiar

I was thinking that today while I was thinking about the man I'm falling in love with, and thinking how uncomfortable it can be that he is so different.

We run toward what is familiar.

And this man in so many ways is not familiar.

Familar, for me, tends to mean a little bit mean and a lot but what about me.

It doesn't necessarily mean kind or interested or engaged. And this man I'm loving is all of those things.

I think that when many of us run toward what is familiar, we are running towards what our souls feel calmed by the repetition of. Sadly, we often repeat what we've known even if it scared us, or tarnished our memories of ourselves or changed the stories we tell about how our lives happened.

I fell in love with this man about a week before I met him. He writes a blog and I read it, and fell in love. Hoped against hope that he wouldn't be horribly geeky and skinny and weird. Made an online date. And he wasn't geeky or skinny or weird; he was beautiful and tatooed and sexy. And he fell in love with me.

And it happened just like that.

Here is maybe the only meaningful thing I can really say about running towards what is familiar: It certainly feels weird to run towards what is utterly different. It is unsteadying to be held by a man who can hold all of you, and who wants to. It's fine to sit leg-to-leg with him on your living room bench, contemplating what the future might hold in a way that only two independent forty-somethings can. And it feels crazy when his face makes your heart leap like a nineteen-year old's.

Here's a really crazy thing: He gave me until the end of the year to move in with him. Or not.

He's not kidding. He says that if we don't know by January that we want to live together, we never will. And that that's not what he wants.

Who is this man?

Back to what I said:

Running towards the unfamiliar can be like plunging into icy water--you simply brace yourself and move in. You can't expect what's coming; your senses don't know how.

But once you're in. Oh...so warm.