girls = confusing

In the last few months, Tyler and I have been making an effort to become more a part of the Evanston community. This mostly means that he has joined a church, and I can recognize several of the PACE bus drivers. Not exactly thrilling stuf.

Anyway, we signed up to do this once-a-week class at Sheil called "Sex and the City of God." Of the dozen or so students, we are the only ones 1. graduated and 2. do not live in dorms. It's definitely been kind of a weird throw-back. I feel so far removed from campus/dorm life!

This week, we talked about intimacy, dating and the hook-up culture. Basically, it kind of boiled down to this: hooking up is super easy, and no one knows what dating is anymore. This one guy literally just said, "Girls, please, just tell me. What do you consider to be a 'date'? I thought I was dating this girl for like, weeks, until I realized that she didn't consider any of the things we did to be dates." It turned into a spirited conversation about dating and how blurred the lines were. Even the tradition dinner-movie-awkward triangle hug at the end of the night (shoulders in, butt out) could be construed a casual night out between platonic friends. Dating nowadays is such a grey area to navigate, it almost makes you long for the structured courtship of times past. Consider:

Dating today
Guy [via phone]: Hey, would you like to get dinner with me on Friday?
Girl: Yeah, sure.
Guy: Great. I'll come pick you up at 7.
Girl: Picking me up to go where? The cafeteria?
Guy: Oh...um. [awkward silence] I thought we could go somewhere else.
Girl: What do you mean?
Guy: Oh...I just thought we could go somewhere else.
Girl: Yeah, that sounds fun. Let me ask John, Jacob, Mary and Stu if they want to come, too!
Guy: Okay. [heart crushed]

Was it clear that he asking her out?? Who knows???

Dating in Times Past
Guy [after waiting in the calling room]: Hello! Can I take you out for a drive?
Girl: I appreciate the gesture, but I'm not interested.
Guy: Right. [leaves]

See how much more clear and helpful if everyone followed some sort of guide? Alas, it is not to be. At the end of our discussion, I saw that Tyler had written on his notepad in giant, loopy letters: "Girls = CONFUSING".

As the class wound down, our instructor, Beth, said something that's stuck with me: intimacy in a relationship is when your proximity becomes liberating. When being close to someone makes you feel more free, more like you can be yourself. Sharing physical and emotional space with someone doesn't mean you have to feel caged in or unrestricted or having to be less of who you are. It was an interesting message to leave with.

After class, Tyler took me home. A couple of odd topics had come up through the course of the evening, and kind of weighed heavily on my mind. You know, all those things about yourself that you don't want your partner to find out about? It's kind of like the emotional equivalent of having/trying to quit a coke habit w/o your partner realizing that he's dating a psycho. Prompted by Beth's description of intimacy, I emotions-vomited into the dashboard of Tyler's car. Flaws, shortcomings, wishing ill on people--things I never thought I'd confess to another person, b/c I was too ashamed to even want to acknowledge them to myself.

"You must think I'm crazy, that you're with this crazy person," I said afterwards, sniffling awkwardly into his shoulder.

"Oh, you," he said, patting me on the back. "Trust me, that's not why I think you're crazy."

And you know, it's weird...but it really did feel liberating.