Wednesday Daniel had his tattoo appointment, Thursday I don't recall if we did anything, but on Friday we headed to the HideAway, the scene of our first date tryst ;) for dinner. I met my sweet heart at his house in a nice dress up dress and heels (fine, wedges) and headed over to south Sac for dinner. I got the exact same meal as last time- a Philly Cheese Steak sandwich with blue cheese crumbles and he had a beet salad. Both were excellent. The HideAway is a little divebar, and not exactly a place you would expect to have gourmet food but it is awesome. They play 50's music and it seems to attract a bit of an off-beat crowd. I love it!
I had really wanted this date to be fun, and lighthearted. This was something I had brought up several times and had gotten a bit tense over. I actually initiated an argument over text (something I am totally ashamed of) about this because Dan and I had this absolute tendency to be extremely serious with each other, and it was a bit draining. I think this was more than likely due to the fact that he was probably depressed and feeling down, and something I realized about myself from this relationship is that I really absorb other people's emotions. If my partner is down, I am going to detect it and reflect it back. That is not something I was aware of before, but it is something that I very much became aware of with Daniel. I think going forward this would need to be something I would have to be very cognizant of because I wear my emotions so plainly that I think it could (or perhaps even did) negatively affect my partnerships. Whatever Daniel was feeling I reflected back to him, which he in turn, felt amplified. This was not good for us and we needed to work on.
Despite all of my hopeful priming about a light hearted evening, our dinner conversation ended up turning into a deep, soulful rehashing of old relationships, heavy duty secrets and got super emotional for both of us. I think we were both really supportive of each other during the conversation, and it was bonding, again, but it was also really draining. I think the conversation also made Daniel feel really vulnerable with me and I don't know why but it made him pull away again. We handled it well, and again, my heart was so full of love for him, but he was I think overwhelmed. Whenever he would expose himself to me in this deep way, he needed some way to take space and recharge. It was almost as if he would scare himself with how close we were or how intimate our relationship was. I accepted him for all that he was and all that he shared with me. There wasn't anything that he told me that made me second guess anything that night, but for some reason opening himself up made him want to close himself back up. I don't know why. I know I am writing this very plainly, but I also have to say that the way he would pull back would probably barely be even detectable to anyone else. I felt like I could read him and knew him so well, and could tell what he was feeling so well that when he had even a flick of any feeling cross his mind that I could just sense it and couldn't help but respond or react to it. We were very emotionally entangled with each other and read each other very, very well. We also supported each other very well, in my opinion, and the more he shared with me I couldn't help but love him more. I certainly didn't love him any less although I think he was a little afraid of that. I accepted him just as he was. Flaws, tattoos, bikes and all. He was a package. And I liked what I had, very, very much.
We lingered over dinner for a few hours, talking, and then wandered up the street to Gunther's, the ice cream shop we had tried to go to on our first date, but it had closed before we got there. This time we actually made it in time!
I remember him being a little withdrawn and quiet while we were in line, but maybe my memory is deceiving me now. So much is lost when you write later on about things. We got our cones and wandered around the cute little neighborhood and then headed to Dimple, which used to be called Tower Records and went shopping for vinyl albums. This is something I had never done before and was SUPER fun. I honestly didn't even know this was a thing still and I really enjoyed browsing through the stacks of beat up Doobie Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, Everly Brothers and more albums and combing through the racks of CDs. I actually have a turntable, I just hadn't ever used it. Daniel bought a couple of Ryan Adam's albums and we went back to his little Victorian in midtown to listen to them.
While this date night was for sure not the smoothest, it was also one of my favorite dates we ever had. We were connected and intimate, poured our hearts out, and then laid there for hours and listened to albums. I spread across his bed and he played his guitar for me. At one point I was talking about something silly to him and he stopped me and said, "You know you are seeing a really private 'Dan moment' right now, right?" and I stopped and watched him instead. He wanted me to just be present in the moment and I shifted gears and tried to be mindful. We listened to "Live from Carnegie Hall," (Ryan Adams) and he played a million things on the guitar, including Wonderwall, which made me smile. That song (like it is to so many people I am sure), is very meaningful to me.
About 2:00am I had started to fall asleep listening to him and suddenly he patted me awake and said, "Okay!" ...As if it were time for me to go. It was 2:00am. I sort of stared at him. He had to be kidding. This was our bonding date. Why would I not be sleeping over? Also it was 2:00am on a Friday, on the night before Halloween. The only people out right now would be drunks. I gave him a look that made clear I thought he was insane.
"Well, I want to be able to start introverting as soon as I get up in the morning and I don't want to have to push you out the door first thing. "
"So you're going to hustle me out the door at 2 o'clock in the morning instead?!"
He dramatically flops over on the bed. "I'm an idiot. I'm so sorry. Please stay."
"Yes, yes, you are. But that is not consent, and it's certainly not an 'enthusiastic yes,' so I am not going to stay."
Both of us being present on college campuses, we had each had extended conversations about what exactly constituted consent. I had studied Title 9 issues when I was at University of Oregon, and of course there is a lot of material in the media at present about consent being an "enthusiastic yes," and as I said in that moment, "THAT was not an 'enthusiastic yes,'" and I was not going to stay the night because he felt bullied or pressured into it. I wanted him to want me to stay over because it's what he wanted, and no other reason. Period.
I started crying, and he got very upset and in all it was a fairly horrible way to end what was otherwise a very good date. He hugged me, and held me, and apologized profusely and asked me to stay repeatedly but I declined. He asked to walk me to my car and I weepingly and overly dramatically heaved out a hearty "NO!"
And he said, "Really?" in a bit of a worried tone. Walking several blocks in the dark to my car in the middle of the night was not something either of us thought was a good idea in general.
"NO!" I repeated, and crossed my arms over my chest like an pouty three year old.
He gave me a bit of a raised eyebrow.
So I sobbed out, "Well, you have to walk me to my car because I'll probably get raped but I don't want you to on principal!" And he laughed. He held my hand and walked me to my car and hugged and kissed me good bye and asked me to text him when I got home safely, which I did.
The next day we each took our introvert days and I for some reason ended up being very sick. I threw up all over myself in the bath tub the next morning and had a raging headache even though I hadn't had more than a couple of beers the night before (and basically beers that were all water- PBR equivalent). I spent most of the day in bed sleeping and feeling crappy. The date the night before confused me. I couldn't understand why we had spent the night getting so close and being so intimate and how it could have ended on such an odd note. I didn't understand what had happened or why he had pulled away. It felt so unnatural and incongruent to what had gone on between us up to that point.
Then around 6pm my phone started blowing up with text messages- apologies from Daniel. He was supposed to have spent the day studying, but instead had gone to the Bay and picked up his new motorcycle instead. Despite the fact he hadn't ridden regularly in several years, he had then in turn spent the entire day riding- long past his endurance point. Although he hadn't driven on freeways (imagine driving from the Bay Area to Sacramento on streets and country roads.... it took him over 3.5 hours to get back here) he still rode an excessively long period of time, and then had gone out of his way to keep riding even after he got close to home. (He drove all the way up to Auburn.) And then, over tired, had stopped at a stoplight or stop sign in a neighboring town (Roseville), forgotten to shift from 2nd into 1st, and then tried to make the bike go. The bike jumped, he flew off the back and broke off... something.... resulting in some gear shift issue, rendering the bike totally un-drivable. On the first day he had it.
"I can hear your smugness through the texts," he said. I couldn't help but laugh, because it was true.
But he went on to apologize, profusely for all of the rookie mistakes he had been making. Not just with the bike,but with me, and with our relationship. The push pull, the being emotionally distant, the booting me out at 2:00am. He told me how angry he was at himself for all of the stupid things he had been doing and he wanted to start making it up to me right away. He asked me if I would come out to where he had wrecked the bike and talk to him, but I told him no. He asked if I would come over to his house and if we could go to dinner, but I again told him no. I didn't feel well and I was totally unwilling to put in any effort into something he was ruining. He asked if he could come over and start making it up to me because he had been such an asshole and I said of course, my home was always open to him. So he said he would be over as soon as the bike got towed and started sending me pictures from where he was at. He had broken his toe (in a couple of places I suspected) and gotten some nasty road rash on his leg even though his thick jeans but was otherwise totally okay. I was just glad he was safe, and nothing worse had happened, and that hopefully this was the wake up call he needed, which is how he seemed to be taking it.
Once he got home, I got a facebook friend request from him. All of these months later and we still weren't facebook friends. Here we were, essentially in a committed relationship, and in love with each other (although undeclared) and yet we weren't even on each other's facebook's. It was absurd and one of the things I had become upset about. In the beginning, I hadn't been interested in being on social media with each other because I wanted to get to know him in real life, but at a certain point it became absurd that we weren't on each other's accounts but he said it would be a distraction before the MPRE. This seemed equally absurd to me but I tried to bite my tongue. My frustration had bubbled up over text the day before and seeing the friend request pop up over my phone gave me so much mental reassurance. So much so, that I didn't accept it. I decided I didn't really need it after all. The gesture was enough, and if he wanted to wait until after his exam, that was totally fine. So I just left the request pending.
Daniel got to my house after an hour or two and found me sitting in the backyard in the dark. He sat down in the chair opposite mine and put his hand on my leg and apologized again for all of the things he had done. It was cold so we went in the house and kept talking about things. We talked for a good hour and I challenged him on every single thing he said. When he said he really wanted to be in this relationship I questioned him good and hard. But he told me, he wanted to "jump" with me, and he was ready. That he wanted me to be his girlfriend, and he wanted to be with only me, and he was sure. He had feelings for me, and he wasn't really sure why he had struggled, but that things had just moved so fast it was scary, but the time alone was really what he needed to evaluate things.
So I begrudgingly agreed to be his girlfriend. ;) But I told him, NO BACKSIES this time. From the first week we dated he had swung back and forth on this commitment to me. Always behaving as if we were in a serious, committed relationship, but the language he used was absolutely inconsistent. And that inconsistency ultimately led to quite a bit of insecurity on my end. We saw each other every day. We certainly weren't seeing anyone else. And we were falling in love with each other. As fast or slow as it moved, why did it matter? Our behavior was clear- we were in a relationship. And as I had told him several times previously, I can give you a grace period on this, but regardless of what you call this, we ARE in a relationship. We are already there. We were from the first week. Call it what you want but we already are. Denying it is just an insult and an upset. Eliminating the back and forth was very important for me. I needed that security.
After our conversation I fully expected him to go home because I think he had a commitment the next morning or had to study or something but he actually asked to stay over and I was delighted. It felt like a band aid from the upset of the night before. Charlie (my beagle) actually forced Daniel into spooning him and Daniel woke me up early in the morning because he couldn't turn over because the dog was so tightly cuddled against him. "It's okay to just push him off!" It was adorable and hilarious all at once. :)
It was a rough week, but it ended on a good note. I don't really consider Halloween to be our anniversary because, truthfully we had been together since September. But it felt good to have that verbal affirmation of what had already been in our hearts for so long.
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