Finishing Up North Carolina the Date

Folks, for Part 1 of North Carolina (the adrenaline part), check out yesterday’s post. Otherwise, we’re jumping right in as though you know what’s up.

At a cozy coffee house, one where the kids of the owners pranced through occasionally, the lighting inspired snuggling and smiles, and the coffee was hot, Mike and I sat down to continue our date. The switch from rolicking laughter fueled by adrenaline to a serene state didn’t faze either of us, and conversation evolved from the constant bouts of laughter to more thoughtful tones.

We discussed the sort of lifestyle we live, dabbled in previous relationship talk, and then moved onto our work. I brought up Vow Muse, my small business in which I write custom wedding vows and ceremonies, where we specialize in crafting these deeply personal sentiments to sound like the client themselves wrote them. Mike was surprised I pulled this off successfully, commenting, “You must have really good intuition.”

Shrugging off the comment, I said no, but he brought it up again, insisting that an ability to write wedding vows for strangers after an hour of talking to them was a sign of being good at reading people. Since he was playing the role of a tiger who wanted to hang onto a squeaky chew toy (aka, a topic), I asked him to expand. He said he had figured out that he was good at reading people, and it had taken a while to understand not everyone was on his page when it came to this. He pressed me to note something else I had read into recently, and though I felt a bit like I was being asked to read palms without the ability to read palms, I mentioned that I had realized my friend halfway around the world had broken up with her boyfriend based on the content of her Facebook status updates. No, they didn’t explicitly state that she was single…more just, using I when she used to use we.

“See,” Mike said. “Most people wouldn’t have even noticed.”

As I pondered his statement, he went on to say that it’s a weird ability to have. That people have a hard time reading him because he’s usually too busy reading them. We continued to chat casually about intuition until I said, “Okay. Maybe you’re right. But I feel like this comes into play most often in relationships. Like, I can tell when someone is going to break up with me months before they do. Or I can feel when they’re pulling away. And it’s frustrating and heartbreaking in the moment, but I always feel trapped in that situation. So…what do you do when you know something before the other person even knows?”

Mike smiled. “Saying something doesn’t usually help. It confuses them. Unfortunately, you can really only wait for them to figure it out.”

“But I know. And I’m always right. And it sucks,” I replied. “I run myself in circles trying to change the outcome, and I can’t. I just want them to admit to me what’s going on when it starts happening so I can avoid weeks or months of being upset.”

“The thing is, people aren’t malicious. They just don’t even know themselves. They’re not really in tune with what’s going on, and they’re indecisive. You can point it out to them but they won’t get it. You can walk away from them but they’ll be hurt because they don’t know themselves. It’s never a good situation, and it’s definitely difficult to know something is afoot.” Mike made sense. I didn’t necessarily like it, but he made sense.

We had to part ways soon after, and both of us did so grudgingly. It was very interesting to meet someone who seemed to *get* me and understood my exact frustrations and challenges in a way that no one else has ever been able to articulate or explain before. Not to mention, his whole mellow demeanor and way of rolling with the punches all afternoon with me, how quick he was to laugh, how conversation just ran away with us once we were talking.

Strange, how he became more and more attractive to me the more we talked. How my first impression of him not being for me had been incredibly wrong. And how he texted me to say the same thing.

Back in Huckleberry Fit, Megan started turning on cameras and was asking her usual, “So, what did you think of him?” questions.

I turned on the GPS, pulled the car onto the freeway, and started crying.

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