The idea of having already met my soul mate just seems crazy to me. It’s been a year and a half since I seriously dated anyone. A year and a half of growing psychically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. A year and a half of trying to sort through this overwhelming world while trying to figure out what is important in life.

Being alone isn’t really fun, but there is a certain side of you that you get to know, a certain side that I think people are scared of. It is a side that is easy to try and hide within interaction and relationships. I’ve wondered recently what has kept me from being in a serious relationship? Poor choice in girls? Maybe there was nothing wrong with them other then they weren’t the one? Or maybe it is something bigger, something much, much bigger…

My romantic relationships have been far from perfect, in fact, they’ve been a train wreck caused by good intentions and bad judgment. However, like everything I’ve tried to learn from them, trying to understand what I could do better, and areas where I needed improvement. There is a special feeling that comes with being needed and wanted, especially in a relationship with another human being. It is a feeling that either makes you feel like you can conquer the world, or a feeling that makes you feel like the world is crashing down around you. While both of those feelings are easily misinterpreted and misunderstood, we give them so much power that one of those two things are actually possible.

I’ll never forget the feeling of having a crush at age 12. You worried about what their favorite color was, and if you knew their middle name things were getting serious. All that really mattered then were the small little facts and the tiny details, the more you knew the more serious you were. At that age we had nothing but hand written notes on napkins or tiny pieces of paper. We didn’t have cell phones or Facebook, we could tweet or like someone’s post on Instagram.

The older I’ve gotten the more I’ve begun to wonder what a healthy adult relationship looks like – or if there even is one.

In this day and age the divorce rate is high and people keep waiting longer and longer to get married and finally settle down. By no means am I in a hurry to get married, but I would really prefer to be settled before I’m 30. That being said, the chances of finding a date worth keeping at a bar, somewhere on a dance floor, or on tinder are slim to none and slim left town. Yet for some reason that desire is still there. The desire to feel wanted and needed, even if it is for just a night; the desire to feel attractive, even if it is surface level; and the desire to be a man, at least in the eyes of the world.

For a while I went along with that process, but one to many mistakes in the past reminded me of how they affect the future and therefore kept me in check. But it made me wonder, what is my future wife doing right now? And what would she want me doing right now?

Looking at it through a two way mirror gave me some perspective and made me realize – maybe I still have a lot of work to do, maybe my frustrations now are Gods way of protecting me in the future…