I apologize for the lack of post yesterday… food poisoning makes fools of us all… :(

Anyway, it’s time to continue the Cobalt and Potassium saga (part one is here in case you missed it)!!! Are you excited?! You should be! It’s time to learn about the “not dating” years….

Year One – What do you do if you really like someone but you are scared of relationships?
We left off on the beginning of Cobalt’s and my first date, back in October 2007… I was super nervous as I was getting ready for our date that we wouldn’t have anything to talk about. It turned out to not be a problem and we had a great time. We went to go see Dan in Real Life and then we went out to pie! It took about two dates for us to realize that we really liked each other but we were both a little too scarred from past relationships to really start something serious. So we decided to go slow. This worked out great for both of us because we got to hang out pretty much all the time getting to know each other.

Unfortunately for us, some of our friends thought we were going too slowly and took the matter into their own hands. By February 2008, I was starting to do a lot of traveling across the country for various grad school interviews (I was gone pretty much every weekend on a different school’s dime – kind of cool but also really exhausting…). Around Valentine’s Day, I was in Washington state and one of our friends told Cobalt that I needed more out of our relationship (not true at all… I was quite enjoying the glacial pace of our relationship to tell you the truth). So when I got back from my trip all excited to hang out, Cobalt told me that we had to “break up” because he couldn’t handle being in a real relationship. I put on airs about whatever because we weren’t in a real relationship anyway so we couldn’t even break up… but it actually really hurt because I realized how much I actually liked him…

Thus began the really awkward phase of our relationship where we “weren’t dating” but we still really liked each other so we still hung out all the time and pretty much acted the same as when we were “dating.” We had weekly date nights, I went to see horror movies with him and the guys, Cobalt pretty much refused to hang out with some of his other friends unless I was there (there was an incident when he and one of our mutual friends, C, showed up at my apartment one Friday night when I was curled up in my pajamas watching TV because he wanted to see me… C was annoyed… for good reason), we attended all parties together, we danced together at clubs, etc. The awkwardness was compounded of course by the fact that I was most definitely moving come August 1st to start graduate school in whatever fine institution I decided to attend…

Year Two – Potassium moves away….
So, as you know, I chose to move to Boulder in the end. It seemed like the best fit (as much as I complain about grad school now, this school seemed like the place I was supposed to be when I moved here) and it was a nice 7 hour drive from Cobalt (I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take that into consideration when I chose this school… even though we were in an awkward not dating phase, I still felt like he was important in my life). Two problems: 1) I didn’t have a car and 2) as soon as I moved, Cobalt and I both realized that we wanted to be in a relationship with the other person but we were unsure about how the other one felt about us – thus providing the awkward context for year two…

Cobalt dealt with it by casually dating other girls because he wanted to see if it would make me jealous (it did) and because he was convinced I was going to find the love of my life here in Boulder and he didn’t want to be heartbroken when it happened. I dealt with it by throwing myself headfirst into grad school (which isn’t hard to do when you have research, classes, and teaching to do every day) and, after discovering the Cobalt was dating someone new and then not talking to him for two weeks, pretending to not be jealous whenever other girls were brought up in the weekly letters we wrote each other (except for those two weeks). Things went especially funny when I did occasionally get to visit NM and Cobalt and I fell back into our normal not dating but doing everything together pattern only to be forced back to reality when I had to go back to Colorado. Towards the end of my first year, things started to change though and I think we both started to (finally) figure out that we might mutually really like each other. Of course, it would be too easy to come out and just say that so it took the whole summer for us to really figure it out. First Cobalt came to visit me in Boulder in May 2009. It was like a change of scenery (hanging out in Colorado instead of NM) was all we needed to allow our relationship to go from really liking each other and pretending it’s not a big deal to really liking each other and maybe being open to admitting it? Nothing really happened and we didn’t talk about it. We were just kind of cute in that “I really like you” way that we probably were like in the very beginning of our relationship back in 2007… Then I bought a car (finally…) and later in the summer, I drove down to NM for a week long trip to congratulate myself for officially finishing my first year of graduate school (complete with finishing the first part of my qualifying exams – a really really really hard written exam on pretty much ALL of biochemistry). This is when it all FINALLY clicked and Cobalt and I actually had the “do you like me? cuz… I kinda like you… a lot…” talk and we started actually dating – though secretly… kind of… because it was still scary to admit we were in a relationship after all those years of confusion…

Speaking of confusion, our friends were very confused. They’d pretty much given up hope about us ever getting together after that whole Potassium-hasn’t-talked-to-Cobalt-for-two-weeks! thing. It took until Halloween 2009 for the majority them to finally figure out that they were actually together! I’ll tell you though… it made me SO HAPPY.

Whew… that was long and convoluted… you’re lucky you just had to read a few paragraphs of craziness instead of live two years about it. Now it’s your turn. Last time you all told me awesome stories about how you met your SO. Now tell me the gory details about the beginning of your relationships! Was it all good and fine once you finally got together? Were you helplessly confused? Did your friends mess it up? Did your friends approve? I want to know all!