Thanksgiving is coming this week and I will be in Atlanta with my dad and having dinner on Thursday at my stepsister Lorri. I will miss spending the holidays with Joyce and her family at her house. I would have preferred to be here but these plans were already made before I met her.
Deanna, Rich, and Scott were here on Saturday, I bought Scott his xmas gift (a snow board set up) and Joyce and I spent the afternoon with Scott. We planned to drive to Stockton to watch Marissa in a band contest but we got held up by traffic and had to abort. We traveled for four hours and didn’t go anyplace but to eat in Pleasanton! Deanna and Rich learned about the Sicily trip and want to go! They visited with Joyce and got along fine. Rich was really joking with her. I am pleased. Last night Jake was in town for business and I have he and Joyce for dinner. They also got along fine although Jake was his normal reserved self. So we are past this phase and so far everyone is doing well with accepting that I am moving on.
Meantime, Joyce and I continue to grow closer. We see one another every night and we spend most of our weekend time together. I worry a little (not much) that the feelings are so intense that it might be more crush than love. However, it sure doesn’t seem like a crush (although lust does enter into the feelings on both sides), I feel more strongly all the time that I really want to be with Joyce. She expresses this same feeling often. To some extent I depend on her instincts because I have no real experience and I know that is dangerous but it is still valuable input for me. She also relates that her friends’ advice has been helpful to her in the past in judging if a man was good for her or not; so far she tells that her friends give me “thumbs up”. That pleases me and it is helpful but still maybe not so objective. At this point we have only established a few things:
We love each other and want to spend time together. We are very affectionate, we hug, kiss, and hold one another very often.
She sees us married at some point but she has no firm idea of when that might be or how the decision would be made. Nor do I.
I see us together but the details of the relationship are not so clear to me but I imagine that for me marriage will turn out be the only comfortable way to go forward.
It is not clear to me where we will be in the near or medium term with respect to living together or continuing the current mode of spending our nights together but maintaining two houses.
All that said, the past Sunday I helped her with some cooking, we played golf, and I helped her with some household repairs. It was fun, we really do enjoy just being together doing normal stuff. Joyce also attended the Photosig with me on Friday and she enjoyed it, I think. I will probably ask her friend Marilyn to go in January, so since she is interested in getting a high-end digital camera.
For now I am feeling good about Joyce and our relationship and I am very very happy. It is important that we laugh together and at ourselves, everything with her is just so easy.
