…Forty Days of Dating, to which I alerted you in my last post, is to be made into a movie (according to some article in my Facebook news feed).

While I loved reading the she said / he said versions of forty days, I was disappointed that these two humans weren’t able to break out of their typical patterns and learn some new relationship tricks. I am, of course, mostly talking about him, because it was he who behaved quite badly toward the end (and I won’t give away the details for those of you who aren’t yet finished). It was interesting how seeing each other for forty consecutive days forced a level of intimacy that resulted in…well…I’ll let you read it. It was a grand and engaging experiment, and made me to feel like a bit of a voyeur.

Still, the predictability of it all should be a lesson to us:  We should pay particularly close attention to those early signs and signals as we begin to get to know another. Maya Angelou is credited with a quote along the lines of this:

“When someone shows us who he is, we should believe him the first time.”

(Pardon my use of the male pronouns in this example; it is, after all, a man I seek.)

With that in mind, I’ve been dating like a fiend and trying to simply let go of any expectation and enjoy myself. The challenge in this is, invariably, that I would quite simply rather be at some other stage than I am in any given moment. For example, when I last had a bona fide boyfriend and he wanted to deepen our level of commitment, I simply wanted a boyfriend to date:  I wanted to keep him to myself a bit longer, not have to think about introducing the children, etc. And now, when I desire more than anything a husband who wants to love and cherish me for a lifetime, I am engaging in what seems an endless stream of first and second dates.

Someone else said that the journey of a lifetime begins with a single step. (Can you tell I’m feeling too lazy to go about looking up these quotes or articles and doing the research tonight?) I am trying to keep that in mind as I hope that one step will lead to another and eventually to forty and then on to a lifetime.

Wish me infinitely more luck than Jessie and Tim found with each other! (I do wonder how they’re getting on these days?)