I waited a couple of months, and then I decided I was ready to get back in the saddle again. (Like I said, I wasn't real sad about this breakup.) I went with eHarmony again, because dammit they have good marketing! I was buying what they were selling, as it were.
It was slow going at the beginning. It's hard to find atheist guys in the middle of Indiana, and after having dated one, I didn't want to go back. Eventually I got matched up with someone who I actually wanted to go out with. His name was Coby, and he lived in the same suburb that I did. The catch was (there's always a catch), he was younger than me [ick!] and still lived with his parents [double ick!]. I gave it a go though. He was a very nice guy, and we went out a couple of times. He apparently wasn't feeling it like I was though, and he just stopped returning my calls one day. ok fine. Moving on.
I talked for quite a few weeks with a guy named Brian. He was in his early thirties and had a little boy who was about 3 or 4. The thought of dating a guy with kids did not scare me, but for whatever reason I couldn't commit myself to even going on a date with him.
About the same time I decided to quit communicating with Brian, I got matched with someone else. His name was Chuck, and it was the same Chuck that I had gone out on the date with before. As I read through his profile, I remembered why I had been so smitten with him in the first place. All of his answers to the questions seemed as though I could have written them. I thought about it for a couple of minutes, then decided "what the hell" and I messaged him.
He responded, saying he remembered me, and we spent the next couple of days catching up. He had dated someone else in the intervening 2 years since we had gone on our first date, as had I. He asked me how law school was going and was surprised by how many things I remembered about him from our first date.
I was going out of town that week, but we made plans to get together the Monday after I got back in town. We met up at a local bar/restaurant for drinks and chatted for a long time. Most of the first date jitters weren't there since we had met before, which was nice. We both joked about this being Date 1.5 for us, as it was our second first date. He tried to say that it was our second date, but I told him that the first date was so long ago that it had to have a half-life by that point. So we settled on Date 1.5. At the end of the date he gave me his phone number, and I actually thought about using it. Until this point, I had never given an eHarmony guy my phone number, so it was terrifying to even think about calling or texting him.
We were scheduled to go out the next Saturday night. I was nervous, but excited. We were supposed to go out to dinner, which anyone who as done ANY online dating knows is a big commitment. [There's less of an ability to cut it short if it sucks.] However, the day before, I got a message from him saying that he was about to go in for emergency appendix surgery and that we'd need to reschedule our date. He was SO apologetic, and I felt so bad for him. It didn't even cross my mind that he might be lying to get out of our date. I offered to bring him soup or do anything that he needed me to (since I'm a woman and I can't help but be mothering in these situations). He declined, saying his friend was going to let him stay at his house that night. I told him I would wait to hear from him and wished him the best in his surgery.
The next day I had a message from him waiting for me. He wanted to go out that night after all, and asked if we could please go somewhere near his house just in case he felt bad and wanted to go home. I told him that we could wait a few days or go out the next weekend, but he was insistent. I picked him up from his house since he was still on pain medicine, and we went to Ted's Montana Grill. We had a great dinner, and he told me all about his appendix surgery and the rumbling appendicitis that he'd had for years. (Such a way to a girl's heart) After dinner we went back to his house and watched a movie. I had DEFINITELY never gone to the home of one of my eHarmony dates, so this was a HUGE deal. I do not remember at all what we watched, but I do remember him kissing me at the end of the night. That was a first too. I don't want to say that I'm a prude, but I'm kindof a prude. I hadn't kissed any of my eHarmony guys up to that point (and there had been quite a few of them), so Date 2.5 was a big step for me on lots of levels.
We started dating regularly at that point. We had been dating about 2 months when I found out that my house (which I had bought with my ex and had been on the market for a year) was selling. I had a friend who was going to rent me her condo on the south side of Indy, so I was all set. One afternoon while I was at work, Chuck sent me a text saying "Don't sign a lease until you talk to me." I figured he knew someone who was renting something out on the north side, which would have been more ideal for me than the south side. Still, I thought it was odd and told my coworker about it. She laughed and said "He's going to ask you to move in with him," which made me laugh hysterically. I sent him back a message asking him what was going on, and a few minutes later the phone rings. I don't remember exactly how he phrased it, but he did, in fact, ask me to move in with him. As I sat there in shock (in my cubicle), he urged me not to make a decision right then and wanted to reassure me that if I didn't want to that it was totally ok.
The whole thing was ridiculous, but I decided to go for it. My thought process was, if it didn't work out, I could always move out and get my own place. I wasn't losing anything by doing it. So a month later, when my house closed, I moved into Chuck's house with him. I had been staying with him a lot by this point, so I didn't think it would be much of an adjustment officially living together, but it really was. The first couple of weeks were definitely full of us learning to move around each other, especially since he had never lived with a girlfriend before (have I mentioned yet what a terrible idea this was?).
The second full weekend of us living together was quite eventful. I had been having these pains in the night sporadically for a few weeks. The pain would wake me up at like 2 or 3 in the morning, and I'd go out to the couch so as to not wake Chuck up, and the pain would eventually subside enough so I could go back to sleep. I thought it was just gas or something. I mean, who really knows what's going on in there, right? Well that Sunday night the pains started at like 8pm, while we were both still up. Since he actually observed how much pain I was in, he insisted on taking me to the emergency room. I felt a little silly, since I was still certain the pains were gas (and oh lord how embarrassing would that have been at the ER?), but I was really not in a place to argue. We went to the hospital.
Turns out the pain I had been experiencing was my gall bladder, and I needed to have emergency gall bladder surgery. Chuck stayed by my side all night that night and all the next day. My mom stayed with me the next night so he could go home and get some sleep (neither of us had slept at all the night before), and then the following day I was released to go home. He took such good care of me while I was all full of holes. I'll never forget the day after my surgery; I was sitting in the recliner in the living room, thinking of how much it hurt to just THINK about getting up or moving. He brought me something to drink, and I said to him "I don't know how you went out on a date with me the day after you had your surgery." And he said to me,
"I didn't want to lose you a second time."To be continued...
Oh Chuck :)
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