Back story…
I met Wayne about a year ago. At the time he was 14, now he’s 15. We’ve been great friends ever since. But, about 2 months ago, we worked on a pretty intense project together, and found out we really enjoy each others company… long story short, we ended up liking each other a lot…
I’m 18, just starting college, he’s 15 (really mature for his age…), junior in high school. (Both homeschooled.) We get along great, have tons in common, but we both know that this is the wrong time for a relationship. We tried to kinda “be a bit more than friends” but that didn’t really work out… So, we decided to be just friends like we were… So we’ve gone back to being casual and friendly, but it seems so fake… like we’re acting…
I guess with time…
I
know it’s the right thing to do… and if God has ‘plans’ for us, He’ll reveal them in His good time, and we’re better off just waiting on Him.
This is really hard though… I miss him so much… My head knows it’s the right thing, but my heart is being rebellious.
Please pray for both of us, I’m sure this isn’t easy on him either…
Thank you for reading my vent… and any encouragement or advise would be welcome.
you’re a young woman, and I’m an old man, so I’m not sure I would have a lot to say that could be helpful. But let me say right off the bat that you’re taking a chance, as an 18 year old, having a relationship with a 15 year old. In my day, we called that “dating jail bait”. Dangerous to go very far with it. Don’t ruin your life. You’re just starting out. If the boy cares anything about you, he’ll understand.
I know this is kind of reversed, but my father was ten years older than my mother. They met while she was in high school and he was already out in the world and an up and coming young businessman. Then she went off to teachers’ college, and in those days travel was very difficult, so their relationship was basically just writing letters for nine months at a time. And yet, the relationship obviously matured or I wouldn’t be here. They married when my mother graduated from college and remained married until my father died at the age of 83. In a way, they didn’t seem a good fit. My father didn’t graduate ninth grade, was, however, highly self-educated and was Irish. My mother was from a family as hillbilly as Italians can be hillbillies. But they were a good fit. They both believed in the very same things in every way.
So I don’t discount “distant relationships”, though I think they’re difficult to maintain. I had a “correspondence romance” with a girl for seven years when I was in college and all but the very end of my graduate school. We both dated others, but kept the romance up even so. I rarely saw her; usually about twice a year for a week at a time. She lived in New Orleans and I in Kansas City, then St. Louis most of the year. But I met a wonderful lady right at the end of graduate school and married her instead. One never knows. But I think I know this. The girl with whom I had the “correspondence romance” and I were from very different cultures. I was from the Ozarks, a country kid come to town, as it were. She was from New Orleans French society. In retrospect, (and I think I knew even then) I was more in love with romance than with her, and I think maybe it was the same with her. I was country in my ways, and old-fashioned even as a young man. I could ride, shoot straight and was full of a prideful sort of sense of honor. I think I reminded her of the legends of what Southern men were long ago, rather than what they had become in New Orleans in her own time. (urban, slick and pretty full of themselves). I think maybe we knew the whole time we each served a purpose for the other that was more emotional than anything else, and while we really did have a mutual affection, we weren’t really a good fit. And the fact that we simply never quite got around to marrying reflected that, and our better judgments.
I ended up, strange to tell, marrying a Yankee girl from Indiana; a working class girl who was the first in her family to ever attend college. Though she thought I was quaint and had a terrible accent, we recognized almost immediately that we could be “confidants” one with the other, in a way that my correspondence girlfriend and I were not, and could never be. We were both plain and direct, knew how to struggle, weren’t the least bit afraid of that, and totally trusted each other in every way. We still do.
I think the direction such things take is providential. I do. I think if we are meant to marry a particular person, we almost certainly will end up doing so, regardless of the passage of time. If not, we won’t, no matter how it might seem at a particular time. I think, though, that patience and trust in Providence is everything.
That’s the best I can do. I will pray for you, and I wish you the best.
