Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Part Two: Just The Three Of Us

Yup, turn up the soap opera music.

I liked Josh. Carrie liked Josh. Carrie and I were close friends and lived in next door dorms. We'd even signed up to be roommates the following year. The three of us were virtually inseperable. All the fixins for some good drama.

And the big question at that time was of course, who is Josh going to pick?

And then Josh asked me to dinner. Me! I was on cloud nine.

Soon into our "date," however, I realized that something wasn't right. We didn't make it our of the parking space when Josh uttered these words: We need to talk. He then proceeded to tell me that although he truly valued my friendship, had no romantic feelings for me. More than that, he told me he did have feelings for (who else?) Carrie, and wanted to ask her out.

Not exactly the first date I'd had in mind. In retrospect, Josh realizes that asking me to dinner wasn't the best plan for such a conversation.

You see, he wasn't completely clueless and knew I harbored a crush for him. I know that telling me he didn't feel the same way was really hard for him. We were extremely close and he didn't want to hurt me or our friendship. But he cared about me as a friend too much not to tell me, and I appreciated it. I later found that he'd agonized over what to do for months.

And you know what? I was initially devastated, but felt a God-given peace about it all pretty quickly. I was mostly worried about losing my friend to "weirdness" between us. I remember talking to some friends about it all the next day and they were like, wow! you're in much better shape than he is! I realized I'd need to be the one to extend the olive branch and assure him that I was really okay with it all. And so I did.

Josh calls that day, "The Day We Became Best Friends."

Weird? Totally.

But when you think about it, if a friendship can withstand kind of drama you know it is for keeps.

And thankfully I left for spring break in Turkey two days later, and got a breather from it all. Things hadn't worked out they way I'd planned, and I was determined to move on.


Dont worry, there's more to this story! :)

4 comments:

Tanya Searle said...

Oh, You are a good story teller. I am anxiously waiting to hear what happend next!!

Kristen said...

me too, i want to know what happens next!

ouch - to think you were going to dinner on a date and then hear he wants to ask your friend out. what a hard situation but you definitely handled it in a very mature way.

Jenni S. said...

I totally agree with what Kristen said - what a mature attitude to have. Since we know that you finally did get together, I can't wait to hear how it happened!

Jaimbob said...

I still remember your first "date" night. And I was really impressed by the way that you handled it. ;)

"Like sands through the hour glass... so are the days of our lives..." (so I had to add in some soap opera humor...)