sex and salsa

Zion Lutheran Church was the last place that I would have ever expected to find advice about how to handle my relationships with women. However, a few months ago I attended church for the first time in over five years. After the pre-sermon rituals that i vaguely recalled from the years of prior instillment, pastor got to the sermon about a topic you don't normally hear about in church: Young Love. After a few jokes, he got to the gist of the sermon, which was that young love is one of the greatest feelings that you can have. However, at the same time there comes a point in the relationship where you have to cast aside your doubts about whether something has a real shot of going somewhere and just go for it. He juxtaposed this with the people who hear the stories of the New Testament for the first time. In the beginning, the excitement is hard to control, but eventually once you have learned the ins and outs of religion you need to cast aside your doubts and put faith in the fact that at night there will be something there besides yourself.

In my life, I've only had two real relationships: one that ended about a year ago and one that I am currently in. I don't date often because I find that my standards for transitioning from a casual hook up to an actual relationship are quite high. The first "real" relationship I had occured with a girl that I genuinely believed I could fall in love with. When we first began hanging out, I saw her as the outgoing, fun loving redhead that she could be. It wasn't until months later that I realized what a one woman wrecking crew she could be. The sane part of me had a front row seat in her destruction of everything that was good about me as she slowly but surely dismantled me and brought out the insane. It took me three long months before we even reconciled. That's why I told myself that the next relationship I was going to get in was going to be with a girl nothing like her. In January, I began hanging out with the girl that is currently my girlfriend. I had watched her in a relationship before and decided that when she started casually flirting with me after a long night of screwdrivers and scrubs that it was worth pursuing. Over the next three weeks, we got to know each other pretty well. It was an atypical beginning to most of my relationships because I found that I had a strong connection with her and it appeared we shared a lot of the same interests. The next month and a half was simply cruise control. We had a few minor instances when she was busy or I was busy and we had to default on plans, but nothing serious. Until of course, the night where I let a little bit of the old me creep back to the present. After several unreturned phone calls and an accidental block on AIM, I confronted her about what was going on. She reassured me that nothing was wrong and that the unreturned calls were due to her having a busy day. After the typical make-up lines, I began to see eerie patterns from my last relationship to this one. Choosing friends over the boyfriend is always a telltale sign that maybe you need to back off for a minute. At the same time, if it's just something that occurs for a week then it's not a problem at all. Unfortunately, I've seen the way these sorts of things begin to unfold before and it doesn't end pretty if both parties involved just ignore the problem at hand. Upon reflection, the only thing that has given me any sorts of heartache or problems over the last five years have been females. School, work, and sports combined could never even put half as much stress on me that I feel when things start to turn bad in a relationship. So at this point I suppose only time will tell where I'll be in a week, month, or a year. This of course brings us to the title. How does sex and salsa have anything to do with a young relationship? It doesn't. It's the exact opposite. At the end of the day, you can always rely on sex and salsa to be there. It's the stagnant that we strive for in times of volatility and the drab we hope to escape during lifeless times. Maybe it's better that we should stick with the safe waters of sex and salsa. But then again, what's life with safe?