Undoing relationships

**This post is brought to you by my ability to procrastinate on lecture prep and an early announcement that I have a snow day tomorrow.**

A couple of weekends ago, BIL guy, who I have now decided to just call Bill, came to my parents' house for the weekend with me. I had not invited him in order for him to "meet the parents", and he's already met my sister and her family before (obviously, being 'brother-in-law guy'). I was perfectly comfortable having him come with me, and he was perfectly happy to come. We did not hit a single minute of traffic on the NJ Turnpike, so the drive only took 6 hours in each direction. It is like it was meant to be.

Then at the new faculty happy hour that week, one of them asked how the weekend was. I think I forgot I had told her about him.

Then he came to dinner for my college friend's birthday. (She, her boyfriend, and Bill and I have had dinner together before.)

This weekend he came to a gathering on campus that was made up of new faculty and others who are friends of one of the new faculty members. Bill thanked me for introducing him to my friends, but honestly, it makes my life easier. On top of that, I want my people to know and (hopefully) like each other. Why would I try to keep different parts of my life separate? I cannot find any reference to this "idea" I had in high school. Idea is in quotes because I am probably not the only person who truly wished to just have all the people I care about live in one town, Jennytown.

Bill also had a friend come into town to see their mutual friend in a show, so there was hanging out with some of his people. We also got to go backstage after the show. It is cool to see how all the stage stuff is organized behind the scene; my favorite part was the penis basket. No, that is not a typo and if you know Book of Mormon the musical at all, you'll know when the basket is used. The fun part of hanging out with his people is hearing stories he has told them about us. I commented that the bar where we were getting a beer was where Bill first impressed me with his trivia prowess (he's seriously amazing at trivia), and apparently he had already conveyed that story to the friend. That trivia night was the first night we hung out. We rehashed, with his friend, how we hung out frequently for what I call 'non-dates'. Apparently in the fall, Bill was not really sure what was going on, but I always said yes to hanging out so he thought that was good and kept asking.

We are to the point in our dating where if we stopped dating, I would have to undo another relationship. I slowly unfriended people I knew through exes over time, and ended up asking family and friends to unfriend CF over the summer, and it is always sad. Having become happy in where I am with moving back to the East Coast, my job, being close to family and friends and seeing them so much more often, now I have to convince myself that it is worth it, again, being open to another relationship regardless of where it may lead, sharing anything I can (including my family and friends), laying it out there what I want and where (at least right now) I am not willing to compromise given previous relationships. That seems like a bad way to think about a new relationship, but right now I still feel pretty protective of my life, career, and, honestly, heart. We keep talking about plans for months away from now, so for now we are clearly good. :-)


Also. Bill punched me in the eye last weekend. Apparently he was dreaming about playing basketball, and some kid was handing him a potato chip as he was going to take a shot. He reached out in real life to grab the potato chip in his dream...and hit me in right in the eye.