HOLD THE LINE!

Disclaimer: this is a blog about my relationship with woman. mom. dad. don't have a heart attack, i know this is groundbreaking... maybe dad should shoot some of that medicine through his nose before reading this. and maybe mom should read this while sitting in her rocking chair.

Getting a girlfriend. Tomorrow my cousin Peter is getting married (congratulations, man!). He is, i think, two years my younger. I think he is the first cousin of mine from my mom's side who is younger than me and is married (not officially yet... tomorrow he will be though which i feel justifies me in calling him "married"). Which has gotten me thinking. it has gotten me thinking about girls, and more specifically girlfriends.

Now, lets lay this down, square one, this is a fact, I HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT GIRLS BEFORE... A LOT! i'm a guy. a single guy. and single guys think about four things-- all the time. 1) girls. 2) food. 3) fun. and 4) what is the deal with girls? Now, i don't buy into the "girls live on a higher plane of understanding than guys do". when i say "what is the deal with girls?" what i mean is, "why isn't she like me?" so those are the four things that single guys think about... quite possibly the only thing in some cases. so lets get down to business. this may be a long post, or maybe i will make it a series of posts, because i have a lot to say on the subject of girls.

If there is one thing i have learned about girls and girlfriends it is that people want you to have one. when i go home from school people do not ask me "have you gotten good grades yet?" they don't ask me "have you been spending enough time playing on your computer?" and they don't ask "have you eaten any special food lately?" what they do ask is, "so, have you met any one special yet?" or "have a girlfriend yet?" or "don't you know that we send you to BYU not to get an education but to come home with a girl?" everybody means well, and this is where the blog can go sour reeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaal quick, but i am gonna take the high road on this one and lay out why i think that people are so concerned about andy+girls= victory!

reason number 1. do you think this guy has a girlfriend? 'nuf said. don't be like this guy.

reason number 2. people find soulmates. they eventuall fall in love and they become happier people, complete people. married people will tell you that they feel whole when they are with their spouse, a kind of person stew that smells great and tastes even better. single people are just one or two ingredients to their own stew and they have to find the remainig parts to the recipe to make their life a stew. like i am just and onion and some bay leaf and what i need to find are some potatoes and some beef chuck. it is completely natural for people who have created this life stew to share it with stewless grifters.

reason number 3. you may appear to be more anti-social than you actually are. when you go home for christmas from BYU, which you have been attending for far too long, and you haven't even brought home the whif of a girls perfume on you sunday clothes people begin to wonder certain things about your social life. going back to reason #1, there is just something about that guy that tells you he is, lets be gentle and make this sound cooler than it actually is, a lone wolf. you don't need to ask him how his dating life is going to know the answer. some people may look at a strapping guy like me and say "his best friend must be the tv remote, that's the only explaination for why he is still single". to be concerned for anothers well being is admirable and something that makes us better than robots.

reason number 4. you may seem cooler than you actually are. looking at reason #3 conversely it is also possible that people look at you and think that you are cooler than you actually are. i bet reason #1's mom probably thinks he should have a girlfriend. this past winter i went home for christmas and sat next to my sister joslyn in the front of sacrament meeting at church. that day i got a phone call from a great married friend asking me what my girlfriend's name was. i was a little confused until he explained the context and i realized he was talking about my sister (whom he knows very well). he hadn't seen her face since we were sitting in the front and he had automatically assumed that i was cool enough to have to be dating some one by now. i believe the phrase for this is looking through rose colored glasses.

this entry has gone on much longer than i had anticipated. so i will leave you with this and save some of my further girl relationship things for my next entry. this is where a to be continued is in order. look forward to part two in the upcoming days and i just want to end with a line from a song that i feel applies to my answer to reasons 1-4. it is from a band named toto and it goes something like this.
"hold the line"
"love isn't always on time"