To List or Not to List.

Normally I am a lover of lists. You know, I’ve blogged about it, and typically I love making them. I love the finality of crossing things off of them, and I love anticipating getting things checked off. That being said, there are some things in my life that I feel I do not need to list out. Things I need to accomplish, groceries, work tasks, people to invite to things etc are all totally acceptable. I’ve even so much as listed out things I would possibly like to splurge on in the future, books I want to read, and potential life goals; However, I have not, much to my mother’s dismay, mapped out the exact characteristics that I am looking for in a husband…

Frankly, I don’t even really know what to say about this. Perhaps it is baffling to some that at the ripe old age of twenty-four I am not incredibly concerned with marriage… at least not in the immediate future. Ok, so I’m not planning on becoming an old maid either, but I can honestly say that I do not spend my days planning out what characteristics I want my future husband to have. (which actually, I think is quite healthy thank you very much). Perhaps it has a lot to do with my current surroundings, and the people that I am around the most. I remember a few years in college when my roommates and I were pretty much taking our cues from Teen Girl Squad, and we all had a crush on every boy; but nowadays a majority of my friends are married, engaged, or significantly attached, and so it’s not like I have a lot of single girl-friends on the prowl. Perhaps if there were more of us, I would spend a little more time whimsically planning out my romantic future… but I kind of don’t think so. I don't spend my days thinking about what I want in a husband, because I'm not too concerned about it. I'll know it when I find it.

It’s been a challenging year, and one that has really solidified for me that I need to start really living in the present and not projecting things onto the future. I’m really trying to embrace things in the here and the now, and making my life what I want it to be, rather than waiting for all the right circumstances, and waiting for things to happen to me. Thus far, I’m thrilled with the way it is working out, and am finding that I am a whole lot happier than I was a few months ago. That being said, I’m still trying to figure out my own life, and what my own wants and needs are, and the idea of listing out what I’m looking for in a life-partner seems a little bit overwhelming. I don’t even know what I want to be doing a year from now, so trying to think about what type of person I want to be spending the rest of my life with is just so not where I’m at… but could someone please explain this to my mother?

She means well, she really does, but our brains work in totally different ways, and I think there is part of her that thinks I am somehow emotionally defunct for not having my “dream-man quality” list at the ready. Granted, it makes it even more challenging when this is something that I typically wouldn’t discuss with my mother, even if I had a physical list filed away somewhere. It just works out better for everyone involved if the sharing about my dating life is minimal. This is not because I’m hiding things, it’s just how my relationship with my mother has worked out (I am totally fine with this fact, she is not. What can you do?) It is challenging to explain without getting into huge amounts of detail, but in general I just feel like dating is between two people, and I like to have time to form my own opinions and figure out what I’m feeling, and where the situation is going before discussing it with anyone, and this for some reason doesn’t sit well with her. She likes things to be done with her timing, and her timing is always me sharing things pretty much the second they happen to me… so not my style. I think it actually has a lot to do with my writing. I’m constantly editing, and tweaking, and re-writing, and I like things to be in a place where I’m comfortable with them before putting them out into the world. The same is true with my life, I like to share things in my own time.

And there have also been a few occasions in the past when my mother (well let’s be honest, both of my parents) have tried to take matters into their own hands when it comes to my dating life (again they mean well, I know this) and as a result it makes me even more reluctant to share. Knowledge is power… and there is a huge part of me that is terrified that if I actually give my mother a concrete list of things I am looking for in a husband, I will suddenly find that she has set up a profile for me on E-harmony.

She wouldn’t really (I don’t think) but she has gone so far as to give out my phone number to one of her patients who was under the influence of anesthesia… I’m not even kidding. This guy pretty much woke up with my phone number, and though he and my mom had a bunch of great conversation when he was on the drugs, he doesn’t remember what they talked about. In her defense, he was pretty cute… and we went on a few dates…but in the end, he was actually addicted to pain pills, and he was a Yankees fan, and after things went south I decided that perhaps blind dates that start with anesthesia are not really my cup of tea.

Maybe I am not in a hurry because right now marriage is not high on my priority list (it is slightly higher than children, but not very). I’m only twenty-four, and I have a lot going on in my life right now, and the idea of spending the rest of my days with the same person is completely foreign to me. Not that I am anti-marriage, or against relationships, I just haven’t gotten around to that yet. Perhaps my priorities are a little askew, but I’m young, and certainly not interested in settling down any time soon. I’m much more concerned with my career, writing, graduate school, traveling, and overall figuring out what makes me happy! It’s not that making a concrete list of what I’m looking for in a husband makes me uncomfortable, but I honestly just haven’t thought about it. Again, this is apparently really hard to believe, especially since I have maybe given a thought or two to what I might what in a wedding. I also blame this on the “being a product of my environment theory”, because I am around weddings all the time. Last year I was in three, had a handful of old roommates get married, and spent a good portion of my work year dealing with brides. When you take into consideration that I am an Event Coordinator by day, so I spend a lot of time advertising weddings, going to bridal shows, and get complimentary bridal magazines sent to my office, I think it would actually be extremely unnatural if I didn’t give any thought to what I might want in a wedding! And weddings are easy! It’s all about your personality and what you like, and reflecting that… and it is only one day! I think it is so much easier to be able to pin-point what you might want in a bouquet, or for wedding favors, rather than to pin-point what you might want in a man you are planning on spending eternity with.

Perhaps I am making the argument that the man is actually more important that the flowers, so maybe I should be spending a little more time focusing on what really matters. But I’ve always believed that things would happen when I least expected them too… so, sitting around thinking, listing, waiting, seems unnatural to me. I sort of embrace the metaphor of the watched pot.

So in the past few weeks, my mother has brought this subject up more than once. I know that she is reading about book about praying for her adult children, and this is probably a chapter focus or something, but every time it comes up, I sort of just roll my eyes. Especially when you start to ask her about the qualities she was looking for in a guy… because to my knowledge, my dad doesn’t have a lot of the qualities on the list (and they are totally perfect together!) And then you ask my dad what qualities he was looking for, and he just sort of laughs, and said he didn’t have any specifics in mind. (Apparently I am my father’s daughter). Even so, it is really hard to try explaining to my mother that I’m still trying to figure out what sort of qualities I want my own life to have!

Anyway, the list thing has been coming up a lot with the family. It doesn’t help matters, that my brother of course had a mental list of what he was looking for, as did my sister-in-law, which therefore solidified the fact that I am the odd-ball in the family for not giving it a second thought.

Then to my surprise I was at work, and one of my co-workers out of the blue asked me if I had made “THE list” (ok it wasn’t exactly out of the blue… we were looking through the before mentioned bridal magazines looking at flowers). Actually one of my best friends had told me a few days prior to this conversation that I needed to start being specific and asking the universe for exactly what I wanted, so I thought it was pretty interesting that now my co-worker and my mother were asking me to make specific lists. Anyway, we got to talking, and apparently my co-worker had numerous friends who were completely frustrated with their dating situations, and so they made “THE list” and both of them were married in six months. I will admit, this perked my interest a little bit (not because I want to be married in six months… more like six years) and I started to think about my current dating situation. I have always sort of been the type of woman who wants what she can’t has (I’m working on it) and I’ve never really had a “type”. Every guy that I have ever dated, or lusted after, or had a crush on, has been completely different from each other in looks, personality, interests, and attitude, and I’ve pretty much always believed that the second I started getting down to specifics of what I wanted, I would fall for someone completely different.

I began to discuss this a little bit more in-depth with my co-worker, because both of us have mixed feelings on the subject. I hate the idea of making a list of shallow, surface level things, and yet also hate the idea of making an incomplete list. “Dear Universe, this is what I want… I think… but I reserve the right to change it at any given time, and add on qualities when they come to me” … My co-worker fully admits that if she made out a list of what she thought she wanted, she would have completely over-looked her current relationship. Of course she is totally happy, but her boyfriend is twenty years older than her, and he is very into cars and fishing. She never would have pictured herself falling for someone like that, and yet here they are. Interestingly enough, her ex-husband is pretty much perfect on paper, and had so many of the things that she would have listed. He was a poet, and into farming, a great father, very literate, and yet things went awry, and the marriage fell apart. The same goes for my ex-boyfriend… on paper there were so many similarities, so many common interests, and so much of what I was looking for… only he is an ass…

So though I am more intrigued now by putting a list out there, I am also a little bit more reserved about it. It seems like perhaps it is a good starting point, but the list needs to be flexible… perhaps generalizations rather than specifics… I want this quality(ish). Now I sort of visualize “THE list” as being a connect the dots picture, with each list point being a dot, and the lines are all the stuff I haven’t quite thought of yet…. So I’ve been giving it a lot of thought the last week…. I still don’t have anything tangible (meaning I haven’t written it down), and it’s still not something I’m quite ready to share with my mom… but I guess having a starting point is better than the alternative?