IT’S ALL ABOUT THE TIMING

“The right person at the wrong time is the wrong person.” Leslie Waggoner

This is first and foremost a love story, BUT it’s also a story about the importance of timing. My sister-in-law, a wise woman, once said, “The right person at the wrong time is the wrong person.”

When she initially told me this, I had just broken up with someone. I was completely heartbroken but had hope that maybe with some time we would get back together. That never happened, but I found myself remembering that phrase years later as I said “yes!” to marrying Tony.

This is the story about how I met the love of my life, let him go, and how he found me again when I was ready.

I met my husband Tony on Tinder. I’ve actually written about him before on the blog post Trusting Your Gut in Relationships.

I got on Tinder just after I ended my engagement. I wasn’t looking for anything serious and wanted to get back into the dating game. I didn’t really give myself any time to grieve or recover post-breakup with my ex-fiance. I was so angry with the lies and infidelity that my ex brought into our relationship. What seemed like the best course of action at the time was just to get back out there. I gave myself a whopping two weeks to “get over a two-year relationship” and started online dating.

If you’ve read any of my other blog posts, you’ll know that this isn’t the course of action I’d recommend now. That being said, I also know that every breakup calls for different things. After the breakup with my ex-fiance, I felt foolish and humiliated. It felt nice to go on dates with people who thought I was smart, fun and pretty. It took my mind off of the fact that I had been dating someone who had continually and blatantly lied to me and wrecked the dreams I had of love.

This casual dating was fun for a couple of months until I started dating someone who really started to like me. It was starting to feel like a relationship, and while I knew that this guy was good, I also knew it wasn’t going to be the right relationship for me long-term. So I ended things with that guy and resolved to get off Tinder for a while.

I stayed off Tinder for a few weeks while I spent some time traveling. When I got home, I pulled up the app again to delete it once and for all when I saw a message from Tony.

Instantly, I was intrigued. He misspelled my name in his message, but I overlooked that when I read that he claimed to make the “world’s best grilled cheese and tomato soup” …and he was a Christian.

“Ok,” I thought. “Maybe I’ll delete Tinder after seeing what’s going on with this guy.”

Talking with Tony wasn’t like talking with anyone else I had met through a dating app. Initially, it seemed like he was never going to ask to meet me in person – instead he wanted to know my stance on all the big issues: monogamy, religion, which Hogwarts house I was in. Important stuff. I remember he asked me about manners. Good manners are important to him. He wanted to make sure to vet me before meeting me. It was refreshing to talk to a guy who knew what he wanted and who has morals and high standards.

Eventually, through a lot of messaging and getting to know each other over the app, we decided to meet up to go rock climbing as a first date.

“Rock climbing as a first date is either going to be really awkward or really fun. There’s no in-between,” my brother Clark said to me on the phone as I drove to the climbing gym. (As stated in a previous blog post on dating – I always let my brother Clark know when I went on first dates for safety).

The date went great. In person, Tony was tall, muscular and had an earnest, sincere manner that made it easy to talk to him. We spent some time climbing, but most of it was spent sitting on the mat chatting like old friends.

My brother Clark says that he’d never heard me sound so excited after a first date. I didn’t go out with anyone else after that date, and it didn’t take long before Tony and I were dating exclusively. He told me he loved me on the 6th date. We met each other’s families. It was all turning out to be the perfect fall-in-love story.

Except for one thing. Me. I wasn’t ready to be in a serious committed relationship. The longer we dated, the more I started to realize how damaging my last relationship was. I was very distrustful of Tony, even though he gave me no reason to be. I was ready to break up with him at any moment because of any real or perceived slight. There was a part of me that so fiercely did not want to be hurt again that it began to interfere with my ability to love and be loving to him.

We were coming up on our dating anniversary of 6 months. Tony told me that he had a surprise planned for our anniversary, and that’s when I knew I couldn’t stay in the relationship. The thought of Tony planning something romantic and special when my heart wasn’t fully invested just felt wrong. It wasn’t that he had done anything wrong, I just knew that it didn’t feel right for me to be in a relationship. Any relationship.

I invited Tony over and told him how I was feeling. I knew that breaking up with him would be hurtful and hard but I also knew that staying together when I felt so messed up and twisted was not right. It was a tough conversation. When it was over, I sat on my couch crying and binge watched all of Making It (it’s a great feel-good reality TV show). Even through my tears and sadness I felt at peace. It was maybe the first time in my life that I had listened to myself instead of what everyone was telling me.

In the aftermath of our breakup, people did not understand why I would break up with a guy who was so great. My family loved him, my friends loved him. It didn’t make sense. It felt right to me though, and I clung to that and continued to feel at peace. Even though I missed him.

Post break-up I took several months where I didn’t date at all. Instead, I focused on my career as a pediatric dentist and found a lot of insight and introspection through writing (aka this blog!). I took time to travel, to see friends, invest in friendships, and make some new ones. Looking back at those months, they were some of the healthiest months of my life. I felt lonely at times, but I had a new confidence. It’s the kind of confidence that comes from listening to yourself and following through.

For the most part, Tony and I kept our distance and didn’t talk. There were a few times where we would text each other, but it was usually brief. I was certain he was already dating the perfect person. Afterall, he was a catch and there was no way he’d stay single for long.

After about 3 months of singleness, I decided to get back out in the dating world to see what was out there. This time I was entering the dating world not as someone heartbroken and looking for a quick ego fix, but as someone hoping to find the love of her life. It made dating much easier. I actually had a lot of fun dating and meeting people, but I was quick to not waste anyone’s time if I didn’t think it had long-term potential.

Then I went on a date that was great. It was with an engineer with golden brown skin who spoke five languages fluently. He took me to a fancy French restaurant for our first date, and we spoke of poetry, politics, travel. I left that date feeling hopeful that maybe this could be the start of something real.

That same week I received a text from Tony. It read. “Hey, can we meet for coffee? I’ve got some things to get off my chest.”

My heart started pounding when I read that text. We hadn’t seen each other in 5 months. “What does he want to say?” I wondered.

“He wants to say that he’s still in love with you,” my friend’s husband said at church that Sunday before my coffee date.

“No way!” my friend and I exclaimed. The phrasing “I’ve got some things to get off my chest,” seemed more like he might want to yell at me than anything else.

“Trust me, ” my friend’s husband said. “If he was over you, then he wouldn’t reach out.”

My hands were sweaty as I pulled up to the coffee shop where Tony and I used to meet all the time. He was already there, sitting by the window with a gray beanie on. I tried to scrutinize his face as I walked up, since he hadn’t seen me yet. I couldn’t decipher anything.

We awkwardly said hello, grabbed coffees to go and started walking. It was a rare sunny day for January in Portland. Skipping the small talk, Tony launched right into it.

“I was really angry at you after we broke up. I just didn’t understand why you would ruin something that was so good. But then I’ve taken time to really think through things over the last few months and I realized that maybe you were right. Maybe neither one of us was ready to be in a relationship. So I’ve spent time working on myself. And I’ve tried to move on from you. I really have. But then I saw you were online dating again and I knew that I had to reach back out to you and tell you that I still love you. Before it’s too late.”

I didn’t know what to say. In order to totally let Tony go when we broke up, I had to let him go completely without any hope of getting back together. Did I still love him? At that moment I didn’t know. What I did know was that I felt at peace talking to him. That same peace I felt in letting him go five months prior was now back as we were walking together.

We caught up on what had been going on with our lives, and it did seem like Tony had really been working towards healing and changing things in his own life without me.

We ended our walk, and he asked if he could see me again.

“I would like to see you, but I’m not sure if I could be anything more than friends at this time,” I said.

“Tesh, I’ve really missed talking to you,” he said. “Let’s start as friends and take things slow.”

Over the next couple of weeks, Tony and I started texting and talking again while I was still casually dating other people. Tony continued to be steadfast – he was all in on pursuing me – even though I was honest and upfront that I was not in that same place. He was pulling out all the stops too – he even offered to take me to the airport really early one morning. I knew he was really serious about me when he showed up at my door at 6am with my favorite Starbucks coffee order. Tony is NOT a morning person, so it meant a lot.

The more Tony and I started to talk, the more confused I became. What did I want?

Two events helped to make it clear. The first was Tony invited me to go to a concert with him. It was the Bay City Rollers and it was a really fun show. Tony looked so great in this black t-shirt that showed off his muscles. He never tried to make a move on me during the show, but I felt really aware of how big and strong he was as he stood next to me.

The second event was the date with Engineer Guy – when I met some of his friends for the first time. It was exactly the sort of event that my ideal fantasy was – we were at a hip space, and I was meeting cool, intellectual, successful people. Then I got a text message. It was from Tony telling me that he was spending his Friday night accompanying a friend to their first AA meeting. He didn’t want that person to go to their first meeting alone and wanted to help them on their journey to getting sober. At that moment, I realized that what I really wanted was a man who would sacrifice his Friday night to help a friend. I wanted Tony.

After that night, I ended things with Engineer guy and called all other flirtations off. Tony and I continued our friendship until one day, he asked me to go rock climbing again. It was the same gym where we had our first date almost a year before.

After our climbing session, in the parking lot of the rock gym, Tony kissed me and I knew that I had made the right choice. This time the kiss felt magical and right. It gave me butterflies.

Not long after that, we officially got back together. This time, I felt sure. I felt sure because I now knew that Tony is a person of quality and substance whether I was in his life or not. That might sound like a funny thing to say, but in past relationships it seemed that guys changed who they were for me – except they didn’t really change. Tony and I definitely had different lifestyles before we came into each other’s lives, but our core values were the same. And it took me walking away and saying goodbye to really know that.

All the feelings of anxiety and distrust were gone. Without my insecurities, Tony and I blossomed. For his part, Tony was more confident and in a better place as well. It seemed like we just… fit.

Four months after getting back together, we got engaged in the presence of my family and it was one of the best days of my life. Then on December 31, 2019 we rang in the New Year by getting married.

Tony completely surprised me by flying down to Orange County and proposing on a friend’s rooftop patio.

For someone who had become so distrustful of men and relationships, things progressed very quickly for me. And it all comes back to timing. Tony and I were not ready when we first met because we both needed to heal. If we had continued to date, I am sure it would have ended badly eventually. The second time around, we both had taken time to heal, to reflect and to grow as individuals. We both gave ourselves time and space to figure out what we wanted.

What I desperately wanted and didn’t know I needed in a partner was someone who wasn’t willing to give up. When Tony came back and said he still loved me after being apart for months, it allowed that tightly wound part of me that said “all men will leave you” to unwind. Tony and I had to be apart to get the timing right.