Dear Husband to Be,
So, twice recently I have been in conversations with people about love and relationships.  They are inquiring (of course) as to your whereabouts, and then I have to reveal that not only do I not know you, but that I'm working my way to "fine" about not knowing you.  Through some logic I've decided there's no rush to find you anymore.  I'm turning 35 in a couple of months and since that brings me closer to out of the baby making stage of life I can slow down on the urgency of you.  I mean, we'd be meeting, marrying, and getting right on that.........and since I don't feel any closer to ready I am closing the whole fiasco down.  And while that is devastatingly sad some days, it's reality.  So I suck it up and deal and so it is.

Now, perhaps we will meet later in life but right now....I wouldn't even know how to transition life to that state of mind right now.  I wouldn't even know how to soak in or react to that kind of attention to me.  I feel like I would see you looking at me caring and inquiring and interested and nurturing and loving and I would be sitting there weeping.  I wouldn't know how to take you in.  There's a time for everything and it's not my time. It's possible I might not have a time.

See, love is beautiful!  It's warm, fulfilling, and even brings peace and varying levels of joy and happiness.  I love my child.  love.  Love nurturing, caring for, teaching, laughing with, and just being. I love my students. The 20 I'm teaching now, the 2 that moved in the school year, and the approximately 60 others I've taught in my classroom since I began.  I even love the others in the halls that look at me bright eyed because I'm Ms.G(!!) on campus.  I love my friendships.  Some days it feels like they complete me.  They can touch and speak to the very depths of my soul.  They know me...even the hard parts of me.  They understand me and we talk and laugh and act silly and cry and can travel to the deepest parts of life and love and nurture each other.  I love my family because even while they don't really know or understand me, they love me.  They love me (and I love them) just because we're family.  Just because.  I even try to love and see goodness in acquaintances and strangers.  I put forth a lot of effort and genuinely feel love for people.

I am only open to the kind of love in a relationship that derives from friendship and travels through those deepest parts of each other and decides even there that these 2 lives can be good together.  They (together) understand and respect and adore.  They nurture and help and uplift.  They are willing to put forth effort towards good for each other and bringing each other down or chipping away at one's spirit would never exist.  That even mistakes and downfalls and maybe even hard times come from good intentions or just life.  Because those things will inevitably come...but not because of wronging each other.
I could never be okay with choosing anything other than that.

So couldn't life just be equally as fulfilling if I filled it full of love, but just not the love from a relationship?  If life is all about love and I filled it (mostly) full of love isn't that enough?

I don't look for you.  Maybe I should put forth more effort. Or maybe I should be realistic.
I'm done for today.
More later.
Stephanie