Relationships.

“Hey, Lorne! Are you and __________ a thing?”

Two years ago, I got together with a man for coffee. He was the father of the girl I was interested in at the time, and he gave me a piece of advice: “Remember what a joy college is, and remember what a freedom it is to be single.” I didn’t take that man’s advice, and his daughter and I were pretty much a “thing” from the time I talked to him until the following August when his daughter and I officially started dating, which lasted until this past March when we broke up.

I haven’t been truly single for this long since the end of my junior year of high school. As far back as middle school, I pretty much always had a crush on one girl or another, but it wasn’t until my junior year that I grew up enough for most of those crushes to become something official. From there, I jumped from girl to girl; my life became a trail of more or less unhealthy relationships leading from that end of my junior year until last March.

This whole semester, I’ve been getting asked, “Hey, Lorne! Are you and __________ a thing?” The first time it happened, it felt like someone shoved an icicle of fear into my chest. Someone asked me the same question again, but about a different girl, and that only made the cold fear worse.

I recently read a book of poetry written from a woman’s perspective. It describes the author’s experience in relationships of all kinds, but there was one poem in particular that stuck out to me.

i will tell you about selfish people. even when they know they will hurt you they walk into your life to taste you because you are the type of being they don’t want to miss out on. you are too much shine to not be felt….that is the thing about selfish people. they gamble entire beings. entire souls to please their own.

Ladies and gentleman, I have been that kind of selfish person. I have gambled the hearts of girls, and I have lost. My first relationships were based more on the girl being interested in me than anything else. I just wanted attention and love in whatever form I could find it, and the easiest avenue for me was dating. It didn’t matter who the girl was; I would get butterflies in my stomach about her for the simple reason that she was paying attention to me.

Obviously every relationship I’ve been in has been very different, and none of them were all bad. They all had different reasons for not working out, but I look back at my own attitude and see this common thread of selfishness. In all those relationships though, I was in it, at least in part, to have another person validate my importance by liking me. My self-worth was based on their approval of me, but no one can bear that burden. The crippling fear I have is that I’ll never be better than that, and that I won’t be able to avoid relationships like that in the future.

Seventeen years ago on Christmas Eve, my one-year-old younger sister, Aurora, pulled a kettle of boiling water onto herself, and burned the left side of her body. My parents realized my sister was going to be stuck in the hospital for a few days. They had all the presents ready for the next morning, so my dad gave me a choice. We could have Christmas on Christmas day, or we could wait until my sister came home. Three-year-old me stomped his foot on the ground and said, “No Dad. We can’t have Christmas without Aurora.” My dad said he would call Santa, and Christmas would be postponed until my sister came home. We had Christmas late that year, but we had Christmas together.

Let’s talk Aristotle for a second. He thought there were three types of friendships. The first two types were based on personal gain. In those two types, you either gained some benefit from the other person, or you gained enjoyment from being with them, and the gain was the basis of the friendship. He thought those two were important, but the best kind, true friendship, was based in a desire for the benefit of the other person. Essentially, you saw the other person had a truly good soul, and you wanted to see them gain for their own sake.

I’m reading a book called Dear Son right now. It was given to me by the same man who told me to enjoy being single. The author makes the point that God is inherently a Father, and we’re all His children. As such, men are all supposed to love the women of this world as siblings. Us guys often do a terrible job of that, and in fact, tend to exploit women for our own ends, rather than looking out for them for their own sake.

This semester I’ve been trying to figure out whether or not to pursue a relationship, but all I’ve been worried about is whether it would be healthy for me. The problem is girls are far more than just potential girlfriends, and I think seeing them as nothing more than that contributes to the selfish mindset I’m trying to avoid. I want to stop worrying so much about whether I could be in a healthy relationship, and instead, seek to prepare myself for one.

If I’m going to date a girl (and eventually, marry her) I want our relationship to be based not on getting something from her, but one based on a desire to give the best I can to her. First and foremost, I want to see all women as sisters, and I want to strive to love them the way I loved my sister that Christmas Eve seventeen years ago. That means service and a laying down of my life for their sake, and if I can hold that attitude in a friendship with a girl, then it’ll only be magnified in a serious relationship.

I don’t know what exactly that means for whenever I get asked “Hey, Lorne! Are you and __________ a thing?”. I guess I’ll try to take my ex-girlfriend’s dad’s advice, and enjoy being single now while I am. As an extension of that, I’ll try to stop worrying about relationships, and instead focus on taking the advice found in the book. I’ll lay down my life for the sake of the women around me, and I’ll pray for a heart that doesn’t want anything in return. It won’t come easy, and it certainly won’t make my future relationships perfect, but I genuinely think I’d rather try and fail every time than give up before I even start.

Originally published at theforlornemoose.wordpress.com on December 23, 2016.