TALK TO HER

a long time ago, i feared that we didn't have anything in common.

no, that's incorrect. i feared that we didn't have any hobbies in common, and i thought that that mattered quite a bit. i worried that we never had anything to talk about over dinner.

so we had a talk.

i didn't approach it as a talk, though: i tried to break up, for reasons that I only recently began to understand.

i came out of that experience with three new things in my mind :

1 - the realization that W is wise beyond her years. cooooool.
2 - the realization that i need to communicate more
3 - a new attitude

I told her then that it didn't matter much that we had only small intersections in our hobby universes, we would have new experiences with each other, and our shared experiences would be far more important than shared interests. we would become our own shared interests.

she liked that.

i liked that.

of course, it turned out that i didn't really understand #2 -- months later, i still wasn't communicating. even now, after i've struggled with and demolished so many of my barriers, it's still not perfect. i'm still gaurded. i'm still seeing false limitations. but i'm not stuck anymore. i'm moving again and growing. huzzah.

that's not why i started writing this, though. here's the cool thing:

that new attitude thing is paying off. i still don't play trombone and she still doesn't drink coffee. but we don't have silent dinners anymore. we have stuff to talk about: shared experience. wonderful, nostalgic conversations about things we've done, places we've gone, moments we've shared. we can look back at when we first met and laugh at how silly we were (what? i was stiff on our first date?? i thought i was loose as could be!! okay, as far as i know, it wasn't "we" that were silly, just "me".) and reflect on what we were thinking. it's amazing to look back -- now that we know each other so well -- on things that we did when we didn't know each other well.

we've got a shared past, now. a history. a vocabulary. lore. inside jokes. dinnertime conversation.

that's way cool.