...and I am completely ok with that. This weekend my girlfriend and I celebrate our 4 year anniversary, which is far and away the longest amount of time I've spent with any one individual. I met this young lady, literally the first day of college. Our University had/has a program called First Year Seminar, where you do orientation and have a class with one group of students, and we happened to both opt for the Ancient Greek Myths class. She definitely stood out among the other ladies in the class, but we were both in otherwise committed relationships, my then significant other having gone to school in Chicago that year (ah the optimism of 18 year old, ThomasjServo).
Zombie Pub Crawl 2012 in Minneapolis
We hung out occasionally on campus, she was commuting to school from a city thirty minutes north of campus, just far enough to be out of the general term suburb. She put up with me even though I was, as she now affectionately puts it, "a smug little bastard." To be perfectly honest, I still am, so she was not far off.
We went through freshman and sophomore year as friends, occasionally having her come around and play guitar hero, or getting lunch here and there. Sophomore year we even had a class together. I did myself no favors showing up to that class... affected and spent the majority of it texting. In my defense, I was in the middle of an experiment to see how affected I could be in a given semester and still make grades. I actually got a 4.0 that semester. While I was still with the girl
from freshman year, things had long since started on the make up break up end of things. A phenomenon I have long since likened to skipping a stone across water. If you do it right it, will skip but each bounce gets a bit shorter. That had been happening for sometime, in fact I even asked my current girlfriend out during one of those short lived break ups, she smartly declined.
I asked her out again shortly before leaving for China, for reasons I am not entirely sure of. What can I say, life is a series of looking back and realizing you were kind of a dumbass. I am reasonably certain that theme will be ever present in my life. She declined, again smartly, as what the hell was I going to do when I left the country for nine months? We chatted a bit on Facebook whilst I was abroad, but I wound up briefly seeing another girl the Summer after I got back, that was until I found out she was single.
Things ended amicably between me and my then girlfriend, and a few weeks later, I wound up convincing this one to come to see Scott Pilgrim with me. We went to dinner, and according to her, when I offered to pay, that was when she realized I was under the impression this was a date. At the time, she was not of the same opinion.
We went to go see an outdoor showing of Back to the Future the next week, and a short run later she came over and said, "So...l sort of used the word boyfriend today... how do you feel about that?" From then on, I've been annoying the shit out of her, and she has been informing me just how wrong I am about what I want to do on a Saturday night, but it has been working well, and I can't see it going any other way for the the foreseeable future.
For the night of, we don't have much special planned we are just going out to a hip new restaurant in downtown Saint Paul, and likely doing a bit of walking around the city. We've agreed not to exchange gifts, though I kind of lied and sent her some flowers which will be showing up at her office in a few hours now. Nothing too out of the ordinary, but she isn't a girl that is hellbent on bucking convention. I'll compensate for my abject lack of creativity come her birthday.
As always thanks for the read TL.