Before Stephanie, pretty much all of my girlfriends had fallen into my lap in some way or another. I started dating when I was about 12 and at the time I was swimming ten times a week at two hours a shot. On top of that I had dryland training consisting of a steady diet of running and weightlifting. My weekends were usually meets, many out of town and even the ones that weren't would start with a 7 am saturday morning practice followed by hill sprints. This complete lack of spare time meant that pretty much all relationships happened within the club, usually after a slow burn from so much consistent exposure to one another. Being teenagers there never really was much mystery to it. Everyone knew everyone and if two people were attracted enough to one another to consider a relationship then it never surprised anyone when it finally became official. I never had to go out and try to meet random people, to put myself out there and play the game like other people.
It didn't change as I aged, either. I decided on massage therapy as a career before I graduated high school and didn't take any breaks between grade 12 and my first semester at the Somatics Institute. I quit swimming when I was 15 but immediately took up kettlebell training, Ketto Ryu Ju-Jutsu and Kyokushin Karate to feed my passion for athletics and fill the massive holes in my schedule left by swimming. Again, all of my dating ventures were born from people inside my comfy social circle, people who were around me all the time for other reasons, got to know the real me and the attraction grew naturally until we both acknowledged it. I left Ketto Ryu and Karate for BJJ and Muay Thai, massage therapy for the fitness sales industry, but still, nothing changed. Whether the relationships were short, long, successful or abysmal failures, they all started that way - the easy way.
Stephanie walked into my store one day, months after the end of what had been by far my most successful relationship. I was in a place where I was starting to think about dating again but no idea how to go about it. My best friend's wife (fiance at the time) had even taken it upon herself to create online dating profiles on my behalf. She walked into my store and turned my entire comfy world upside down. She was looking for a cheap doorway chin-up bar, but we ended up talking for about an hour. I was inundated with every cliche I've ever heard of - the butterflies, the stuttering, the clumsiness, everything. I knew I had to do something but I didn't know what, so I ended up taking her information for the chin-up bar, even though we don't really need it for such a cheap soft good purchase. After she left, I couldn't stop thinking about her. I called my co-manager Jessica, my brother, and my best friend even though I didn't really know anything about her. I spent the rest of the day grinning like an idiot.
I ended up calling her at work with the cheap and incredibly transparent excuse of seeing how her chin-up bar was working out for her. After a brief laugh when she told me she'd torn down her doorframe with it, I asked her out. She said she would call me back since she was at work, though I found out later it was because she needed to break it off with the guy she'd been seeing because she was secretly just as crazy about me as I was about her, and hoping I would call her. When I picked her up for our first date, I was nervous as hell, especially because I realized that I was 24 years old and had never done this before. This was the first time I'd had to fly blind in this situation, not knowing if she was attracted to me or not and knowing that I had no cushioning to fall back on, no history of not acting like a tool around her for her to refer to and realize that I wasn't being myself. I stood a very real chance of screwing this up, and if I did then it would be all on me.
That's the difference. I am who I am and Stephanie is who she is, and no matter how we met I have faith that we would have eventually gotten to this place together, but she was the first one I've felt like I had to go out and get myself if I wanted her. I had to dig deep into places I'd never explored within my emotional sense of self and learn the skills I'd never learned back when I was a teenager, when it didn't matter anyway because the relationships had no substance or basis in reality. It wasn't easy this time, but as soon as I saw her walk in the door I knew I would do anything.
Oh, and she's actually EXCITED about the idea of making our entire basement into a dungeon of Elite FTS equipment when we buy a house. Score.
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