When I was in my mid-twenties, I spent the summer working at\na church camp in northern Iowa.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
With very little dating experience under my belt, when an attractive young lady named Melissa expressed an interest in me, I was more than eager to establish a relationship.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
(Spoiler alert \u2013 This was the first Melissa I ever dated and I only ever married the\nsecond one. So let\u2019s call her redhead Melissa.)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
That summer, Redhead Melissa and I were not\nthe first couple to form among the staff, nor the last. I was relieved not to be left sitting on the edge of the dating pool for once.<\/p>\n\n\n
Early in June, we knew camp was going to be closed for a few extra days around the\n4th<\/sup> of July weekend and I asked redhead Melissa if she would like to\ntravel with me to Indiana to meet my parents. I was perhaps taking things a little fast.<\/p>\n\n\n In the few weeks between me asking and the holiday weekend\narriving, I had already decided there was no future to the relationship. In\nfact, she was driving me a little crazy. She couldn\u2019t stop talking. If there\nwas a lull in a conversation, she filled it \u2013 with something.\u00a0 With anything. No matter how inane.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n Her go-to filler was this question: \u201cWhat are you thinking about?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n I didn\u2019t renege on my invitation to Indiana, but I should\nhave. For both our sakes. It was an 11-hour drive. When she offered to drive for a few hours, I gladly allowed it so that I could close my eyes and pretend to be asleep.<\/p>\n\n\n At one point, on the drive back to Iowa, after a weekend which must have left my parents scratching their heads, I was behind the steering wheel and we hit one of those lulls in the conversation. Redhead Melissa asked, \u201cWhat are\nyou thinking about?\u201d And I could honestly answer, \u201cI was just sitting here wondering\nhow long it was going to take before you asked me what I was thinking about.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n Unbelievably, later in the day, Redhead Melissa again asked, “What are you thinking about?”<\/p>\n\n\n This time I responded, “If I wanted you to know what I was thinking, I would have said it out loud.”<\/p>\n\n\n The relationship didn\u2019t last much longer after that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was in my mid-twenties, I spent the summer working at a church camp in northern Iowa.\u00a0 With very little dating experience under my belt, when an attractive young lady named Melissa expressed an interest in me, I was more than eager to establish a relationship.\u00a0 (Spoiler alert \u2013 This was the first Melissa […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1809,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808\/revisions\/1809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}