Ladies, you know how good it feels to walk around the house in a BRAND NEW pair of shoes, even though they’re hardly appropriate for the occasion and you’re not wearing them out yet? Or how delicious that first bite of macaroni and cheese is when you taste it before dinnertime? Relationships can be like that, too. Max’s post on Monday got me to thinking about “do-overs.” Do-overs can work, in the right circumstances. Let me tell you about my relationship with Mr. Wonderful. Mr. Wonderful was the yin to my yang in many ways, we were the personification of the phrase, “opposites attract”. He was a 19 year-old, playboy engineering student, with a killer smile, well-defined muscles (with the requisite tattoos), and a little black book to match. You could find him oversleeping for class or at the parties of one of the other universities adjacent to our predominantly- white institution (PWI) in one of the nation’s “Blackest” cities.

I, on the other hand, was a 20 year old virgin, Management major, co-owner of a business, head in the books, devoted to community service. I could usually be found at my on-campus job, serving my community, or in the library. Our paths first crossed the summer before freshman year of college. He was a friend of a friend, but we probably never had a real conversation at that point. I would later find out that he only knew me as “the girl with the pink lips”. It wasn’t until second semester of our Sophomore year that we had a more memorable meeting. It turns out we shared a passion for Entrepreneurship and Business… There we sat, in an Entrepreneurship class, two of four Black students in a class of over 100- a circumstance we had already grown used to. Naturally, we each sought the familiar face. Our conversation was so riveting; neither of us know anything that happened in that first class. For the next month, Wednesday evenings were reserved for the two of us. After our class ended at 6pm, we would spend the entire evening together- going out to eat, sitting in my car talking, at the library, “studying”— it was the best mindfuck either of us had ever experienced.

We spent the next five months spending every spare moment we could together. Ours was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” relationship. On many occasions, he would ignore booty calls and texts while sitting in the car, just talking and enjoying a milkshake with me. Secure in my worth, this never bothered me. On the flip side, I was “dating” an Accounting Major my parents and congregation deemed appropriate. But none of that mattered. In the little bubble that was my car in the wee hours of the morning, our relationship was perfection. We understood each other, and felt free to express ourselves. Unfortunately, the perfection ended when we exited the car. Our glaring dissimilarities threatened to tear us apart. Our feelings for one another were deepening, and the sexual tension between us was palpable. He knew my feelings toward casual sex/relationships (with my virginity still intact, it WASN’T happening!); I knew his feelings about committed relationships (he wasn’t interested). And so…we parted. Simple as that. One day, we just stopped talking, emailing, gchatting, AIMing (uh oh, did that show my age?). We just cut each other off. No difficult conversations, no awkward goodbye, no “we can still be friends”. We both simply retreated into the safe relationships that were familiar to us. He, to his jump-off (whom he later gave a title), me, to my “socially acceptable” Accountant. For over a year and a half, we only spoke when we happened to pass one another on campus, or when Facebook reminded us that the other existed. It was as if we had made an unspoken decision not to ruin what could be by what was. We weren’t ready for one another—and we both knew it.

Fast forward 1.5 years. I have become disillusioned with my self-important, unaffectionate Accountant, and he has left his girlfriend of almost a year to study abroad in Southeast Asia. We reconnect over gchat. We are both at the end of our relationships, and initially, we are one another’s sounding boards. Then…the conversations got deeper. Fast forward to now. Mr. Wonderful and I have been together for over two years. Though we live 1,900 miles apart, our jobs allow us to see one another every week, if we choose. We are contemplating marriage and building a life together. We both agree that none of this would be possible, had we not had the foresight to just LEAVE one another alone when it became apparent that we wanted different things. So often, we meet the RIGHT person at the WRONG time, and our fear of losing them causes us to hold on too tightly. That fear sometimes results in us losing them forever. I think do-overs are possible, if you’re willing to give up what you ARE for what you have the potential to become. What do you think readers? Have you ever been with the right person, at the wrong time? What did you do? Also, how do you even KNOW if the person is worth risking a do-over? Show me some love in the comments while Max is partying it up in D.C.