One of my best friends … and incidentally, also my first boyfriend … writes me this week about his girl troubles.  He’s dating a girl who, by his own admission, is highly unstable and wildly volatile.  She has a host of mental issues, often resists medication, and fluctuates from here to forever but—he assures me—loves him fiercely.  So fiercely that she’s thrice tried to kill herself when he goes out of town, or when they fight; when she feels unsure, the paramedics come.  Trouble.  It’s all I can do to keep from screaming BREAK UP WITH HER NOW—because I’ve done that, plenty of times over their three years together.  He knows how I feel.  She is precious, of that I have no doubt, but she needs far, far more help than he can give. And yet, he tells me, they’re moving in together next month.  “I’m worried that it’s too soon, and I’m still not sure about this relationship,” he said.  “But she needs me.”  He isn’t answering his phone.

A friend of mine from school got engaged this weekend, to a guy she’s been dating since I’ve known her.  Nice guy; always been really good to her, and to me.  Something about him just doesn’t seem right for her, though.  I’ve never thought so.  Actually, I’ve always thought he was kind of a well-intentioned loser.  She’s so dynamic, so lovely; he’s so mediocre.  I think she can do so much better, but I’m not confident she sees the girl I do when I look at her.  I’ve tried to talk to her at various points about how their relationship is going, to suss out whether she’s really happy; I feel like she is, but only on the surface.  She wants a wedding.  She wants to be loved.  We all do, on some level, but where do you draw the line? When do you say, sister, stop pining after a loser, you are fabulous? I can’t know the whole story, none of us ever can. Maybe he is perfect for her: I’ve just never, ever bought it. He finally did the whole get-down-on-one-knee thing, and of course she said yes. Honestly, I was kind of hoping that he never would, and she’d move on.  How could I have said that, though, without looking like the bitter and jaded single friend?  I’m not jealous of her relationship.  Maybe it’s just that I know something about settling for what you think makes you happy, without considering what real happiness looks like.  I’m working on putting on a real smile for them.

The India trip my church has asked me to go on is a week-long trip as ambassadors of the Anglican district of Virginia (and yes, I still consider myself Catholic; crazy, I know). We’ll visit churches there, and say hello from the fair commonwealth; we’ll learn about them, and they about us.  Excellent, I think.  At a planning meeting yesterday, the leading priest asked us to give our testimonies—to tell our stories of how we found God.  I grew up Christian, which is not a very interesting tale.  Instead, I described how I found God as an adult—which (regrettably) is essentially a march through the big mistakes of my relationships gone totally bust.  The Japan man started it off, of course.  Then the whole almost-getting-engaged-to-J thing.  I screwed up, and God found me.  True, but not necessarily a fun story to tell a room full of people you barely know (especially when one of them is actually a pretty good-looking single smartie—a  PhD, he has!  Hooray! I’m going to work on sitting next to him on the long flight, mmm-hmmm).  It gets better, though.  The priest calls my story “inspiring,” then tells us we’ll all be sharing our testimonies in India, IN FRONT OF A CONFERENCE OF INDIAN BISHOPS.  Hi, I’m magda, and I suck at relationships.  God’s found me after I’ve f’d everything up, in all possible ways.  Nice to meet you, too.

The PhD smartie sent me a really nice e-mail after the meeting, saying he wished we could have had more time to talk, and hoping I had a nice time in Boston last week.  As I was writing back, a new message came in.  From the Japan man.  He’s “decided to kill some time by taking a road trip.”  Evidently he’s planning on DC.  “Would you be up for a visit early to mid-week?” he writes.  After MONTHS of silence, he wants to come. I haven’t written back. 

Dear Japan Man, you are four years too late. And I’m worth so much more than time killed.

It has not been a winning week for relationships around here.  But perhaps, perhaps there is hope.  The PhD smartie takes but a day to respond.  Saieth he, “you write the greatest e-mails.”  Indeed I do!  Well, most of the time, anyway.  This is promising.  We’ll see.  Stay tuned.