Dinner for 8

I had dinner with 7 other people from my church tonight. One of them was my friend and fellow single woman, Claire. Claire is 27 and working on her PhD. She recently ended a relationship with a man from Seattle and seemed pretty heart broken about it a month ago. But her spirits are now looking up. She's a great girl. Very smart and very savvy, and will have no problem landing a man in the future.

Irv and Sandy hosted the dinner. Irv is tall and slender and wears his trousers pulled up above his belly button like most 70-year-old men. Sandy is an extravagant red-head. Her sweater was black and decorated with sequined orange pumpkins. I had heard that she was a bit of a perfectionist and she lived up to the stereotype with a delicious dinner and well kept house. Likewise, she and Irv kept the conversation flowing by carefully calculating their questions and comments, allowing none of their words to seem out of place.

The Higgins (her name was Arlene but i didn't catch his--even after a two hour conversation) are in their fifties and work blue-collard jobs: she sells appliances at Sears and he works for a company that sells some kind of chemicals. They have three children, and Arlene is preparing to sew a wedding dress and bridesmaid''s dresses for her daughters wedding next August.

Polly Brown and her husband (again, a name I did not catch partly because it was so unusual. It sounded like they were calling him Ollen) are originally from Oklahoma, but moved here with the intention of staying for two years while he worked at the university. Fortunately for me, they have stayed much longer and now I have a chance to know this delightful couple. They are both in their seventies and are perfect compliments to one another. Throughout the night, Ollen would begin a story only to stop and announce that Polly could tell it much better. Then, he would politely step aside and let her take the stage. She was wonderful, telling stories with delightful animation and great voice inflection; she drew her audience in to every word. He had a dry sense of humor that would come out at awkward times with a seemingly cliche joke that no one else seemed to catch until he pointed it out. Both seemed humbly dignified, if there is such a combination, and like Irv and Sandy, they seemed perfectly at ease with one another.

The Higgins loved each other; you could tell. But I assume they haven't been married as long as the other two couples and it seems they are still figuring each other out. And that's okay because even my parents after 25 years still have a few things to work out. And I imagine, that even after the fifty years that Irv and Sandy have shared, rocky situations still occur. Yet, somehow, their gestures prove that they are completely in love and trust that the other will be there forever.


What does this have to do with a blog about dating? Well, after a four year hiatus from any sort of interaction with the opposite sex...I have decided it is time for me to step back into the dating world--something that scares me like nothing else has before. The thought of actually saying yes to a guy that asks for my number instead of making him feel like an ass, brings all sorts of fears to my chest and I get butterflies. Yes, butterflies--those silly little insects that haven't come to visit me since high school.

After high school I swore off dating , marriage, and relationships in general for various reasons, which you may eventually learn. But a series of events over the past year led me to a change of heart, and I'm ready to give the male population another chance.

Watching the three couples at dinner with tonight alluded to the fact that I have made the right decision. While I am by no means looking for marriage, they made me see that a relationship may not be such a bad thing. Listening to Ollen and Polly assist each other in story telling and laughing at Irv as he corrected Sandy's stories, I realized that marriage may not mean giving up what I love most or losing my identity in another person. If anything, the grace and comfort that these couples showed one another revealed to me that a relationship, at any stage, may actually cause me to find who I am. Each person that comes into our life has something to show us or teach us--something that, no matter how painful it might be, will hopefully grow us into a better person.

So, dating world....here I am. Give me what you got and teach me what you will.