The first time I just knew (part 2)

After Chanel got married, I wanted nothing to do with marriage. I continued to date girls, I just wasn't thinking at all about marriage while I dated them. When I was on my mission, at my final interview with my mission president, I expected him to give me "the talk" about how my next goal was marriage. He didn't. In fact, not a word was said about marriage.

I started dating with a frenzy when I got home. I went out with lots of really amazing girls. Some were great Mormon girls, some were kinda Mormon, some weren't Mormon at all. LittleChanel was only 16 when I went on a few dates with her. I knew her dad didn't particularly approve (he was my home ward bishop) of her going out with this long haired older kid. LittleChanel told me years later that she never felt like I really opened up with her. I think her dad sensed the same thing.

I went on several dates with a tattoo artist. She had run away from home when she was 15 to work as a stripper and support her drug habit but had since gone clean. I dated a girl 6 years older than me. While I was dating the older girl, I ran into a buddy from high school named HandsomeRob. He was with his girlfriend named Lilo. I had never met Lilo but I thought she was very pretty that day.

About 2 months later, I received a random call from HandsomeRob. He told me he and Lilo had just broken up and suggested I take her out to help her adjust to moving to a new city. It seemed so random but I was pretty open to the idea. He gave me her number, I called her, and we clicked immediately. She had been dating HandsomeRob for a couple of months and it was probably refreshing to have a conversation with me. Don't get me wrong, HandsomeRob has been one of my best friends for many years. But, he is a slowtalker. A slowtalker is a person that has an extra delay before they say something in a conversation. Slowtalkers are not any less intelligent than normaltalkers (or fasttalkers like myself), they just like to process what they are going to say before they say it. Having had many phone conversations with HandsomeRob and other slowtalkers, I knew how difficult it was to deal with. Our first phone conversation went really well. We agreed to go on a date that Saturday to a homecoming at my university.

On Friday, my band was playing a concert for the high school I attended as part of the homecoming festivities. After the concert, I stuck around to watch a little football and ran into Lilo there. We chatted some more, clicked even more, and agreed to meet up later that night to "watch a movie." I think we watched Joe Versus the Volcano that night. We cuddled and ended up kissing. It was by far the best kiss I had ever had in my life.

I just felt a strong connection to her. We began spending nearly every day together. I was studying for the LSAT; she would come over every evening. At the time, Lilo was 18 and I was 24. But we seemed to have so much fun together. She loved it when I played my guitar for her and sang. I think I sang to her nearly every night. I wrote quite a few songs about her. Things just fell into place and I knew that I was going to marry Lilo. It was like everyone had always told me, things would just feel right and work out perfectly. I felt like a fool for having not believed them.

About two months into our relationship, I tested Lilo a little too much. I asked her how she would handle being married to someone poor. Lilo had some interesting personality quirks. One was that she absolutely would not defecate anywhere but her own home. I worried that Lilo might not be capable of dealing with rough times when they came up. The conversation didn't seem too bad at the time but I guess I touched a nerve with her. A day or two later, I asked her if she wanted to spend some of Thanksgiving together. She got scared. She said something like "why would we spend Thanksgiving together? we're not engaged Tripp!" I think I said something back like "well, don't you think this is moving that direction?" The damage was done.

A couple days after that, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Lilo came over and broke up with me. (To be continued...)