I'll have an order of "this is exactly how I want my life to be", please?

Here's a scenario for you: You sit down to talk with a female friend of yours over coffee. You've been talking for a while and begin to get into a fairly engrossing female topic...weddings. Now, not only can this girl tell you where she wants to get married, but also her exact wedding dress, bridesmaid's dresses, wedding cake, flowers, ceremony order, food at the reception, song for the first dance, the song for the daddy-daughter dance, save-the-dates, but also what will be her something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. Now, here's a question: How long has this female friend of yours known this information? Well, if you're a girl like she is, you'll know precisely how long. It's for as long as you have known, which is first or second grade. 

To most guys, this sounds like absolute ludicrous. To most girls, however, it makes perfect sense. If you are a girl that does not have her entire wedding planned out, how many children you want to have, and what kind of house you eventually want to live in, you are disgracefully frowned upon. This is only natural. Women as a whole tend to live more in the future than men. We yearn for the day when these fairytale-esque experiences will finally come true. We long for the time when we get to wear out Pnina Tornai ball-gown while walking down the aisle of some gorgeous church behind our bridesmaids in "Tiffany"'s blue silk dresses. And as natural as this may seem to be, I'm worried about how healthy it is.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as guilty of it as the next girl. I remember at 7 years old having three or four hour long phone calls with my best friend Kelsey discussing all of these things. We still call each other when a new baby name comes along, or a detail changes in a wedding (I must say though, the last one is usually her, considering she is much closer to this possibility than I am). But I'm trying more than ever to live life one day at a time, because who knows if I'll get tomorrow? 

The other day I was told it was impossible for me to live life one day at a time. That there was no way for a girl to not care at all about the future, to not read into it. And you know what? That person is right. It is impossible, because we all, including guys, have to have some kind of goal or aspiration to keep us motivated. But there is a line. I think I finally found this line, or at least I'm teetering around it.

Work for the future, but don't forget about the present. Try to live as much as you can in the moment, but remember that what you're doing right now affects what happens to you in your future. It all connects. There's no way out of that. That doesn't mean I have to know my hors d'oeuvres menu for my (at the time) nonexistent wedding. This doesn't mean I need to know my exact square footage for my two story (plus basement) Victorian style home with a wrap around porch. It means I need to know that I want to love, and live, and be happy, and live my life to the fullest. Everything else should fall into place...Tiffany engagement ring and all. :)

By the way, I have a new Marry Me Playlist song. "She is Love" by Parachute. The acoustic version. Everyone should listen to it. :P

These are the moments.

Oh gosh, I don't even know where to begin. These past couple of days have been so ridiculously hectic that I think my brain is just now slowing to a stop from the spinning it's been doing. As a lot of my friends know, I've "homeless" for winter break, basically house-hopping and being extremely grateful for my amazing sister and group of friends that must love me a lot. With that added stress and all the events that have panned out within the last week, I have a lot to write about.

Something I've learned about myself: I have this complex, see, that makes me tend to blame everything on myself. Something wrong with me and a friend? I did something wrong. My mom is dragging her boyfriend in all hours of the night? I must have done something bad. An awesome plan gets cancelled? Twice? Well, I REALLY must have done something bad. I've done this for a while, but I've never really understood why. Today I think I figured it out.

It's easier for me to blame myself for these actions and responses because I can control myself. I have control over what I can and cannot do. And if it's someone else who is causing the problem, I really can't make it better. This entire week I've been having problems with someone, honestly thinking I had done something horrible to deserve how I was being treated. I was all but in tears when a friend of mine sent me this:

"Well, sometimes you just gotta realize that his faults are not your fault. I mean, what he's doing is wrong, but it's HIM that's doing things wrong, not you. I mean, this is something that he's been doing for a while. It's a big problem, but not your fault. What could you have possibly done? You've done everything right, he's made the wrong moves."

For the first time in a long time, I kind of saw this truth. I mean, there are things I do that merit people to be mad at me. I know I'm going to screw up, but this has not been my fault. And I can't try to take on everything on my own. It's exhausting, and impossible, and quite frankly, I'm tired.

My friend leaves for England sometime soon. I don't know what day; He won't tell me. And I've just now come to terms that I'm not going to get to see him before he leaves. He'll be gone for six months and even after that he's going to continue to travel. This person has played such a huge part in my life in so many different ways over the past few years that not being able to say my goodbye is like having the breath knocked out of me. It chokes me to think about it. Already this has been a week on a roller coaster, now this just makes me want to crawl into a hole for a few days until it's all blown over. I wish life was like that sometimes. 

These are the moments that I thank God for the people that have stayed strong in my life. These are the moments I wish I could go back and change some things, but know it's not possible. These are the times I long for a steady hand, and find one in Christ only Him. Because I'm right, it's impossible to do this alone.

When a guy poses this question, you know it's something worth talking about...

"Molly, do you ever wonder why people are drawn to each other?"


I was asked this question yesterday, and to be completely honest, it really threw me off-guard. Not just because it was asked by a guy (which right there just tells you something), but because for the first time in a long time I truly wondered why. Of course, this has run threw my head before. I think a lot of us have struggled with this question for a long time. What makes us drawn to one person over another, even if they do have similar attributes? Why are we drawn to what we are drawn to? And to go a step further, how and why can we be drawn two completely opposite types of people? 


As I walked around campus today, listening to the clock tower play Christmas carols and watching couples hold hands walking in the cold to class, this question hit me harder than ever. And this is what I've come up with.


There are so many components to attraction and being drawn to a person, but I'm not sure if they're necessarily the same thing. I know that there are times I've been really attracted to a guy, but really, that can be chalked up to me just liking the way they look, what they do, how they talk, etc. But being drawn to someone...it's on a deeper level. It's magnetic, almost. And sometimes you can be drawn to someone that you would never expect to be drawn to.


Attraction is explainable and usually it's obvious why you are attracted to someone. In Philosophy, we've study the art of love and attempted to answer the forever old question: "What is love?" And although attraction is mentioned, every text or discussion we had always dealt with something more than that. Brain chemical such as dopamine? Sexual drive? Attachment? All of these were debated, but one thing we never really talked about was the possibility of just being drawn to a person. Why is that? Do we constantly have to have a clear cut explanation for everything? Or can we accept that there are some things, like this, that can't always be black and white?


With that stated, can we even connect being drawn to a person with love? I'm sure in some way they overlap, but I'm not sure they're the same thing. There's so much grey area with both topics that it's almost impossible to get anything of true clearness laid out. Difficult, right? 


My final analysis: There's a reason why you're so drawn to one person, something deeper than attraction, but not necessarily love. Something that puts that person above others like them, or not like them. And the only way you're going to find just exactly what is different is to follow that pull, that draw, that almost magnetic force. Basically what I'm saying is that sometimes I think we get so caught up in the logistics of a situation like this that we forget to watch it play out. Not much a clear answer, but hey, this is grey area. :)