How I Met Your Mother: Part 3

So here was the situation from part 1 and part 2, Alise and I were great friends, but she had also made it clear that she was not interested in anything more.  I however, was drawn to her more than any other person I had known.  I enjoyed being friends with her but felt that if I could not date her, I didn't think I could stand to be around her anymore.  Why was I so drawn to her?  What made her different?  For one, her purity.  She was so innocent and pure.  The best way for me to describe it was a pure outlook on life - she could see the goodness in everything.  She loved God and was determined to follow that love.  But what really set her apart for me was how she made me feel: she made me want to improve myself, to make myself better.  It wasn't that I wasn't good enough for her, it wasn't that she told me that I needed to be better.  She was such a great person, she deserved someone who wasn't satisfied with mediocre.  To steal a line from movie "As Good As It Gets" - she made me want to be a better man.  Cheesy, but I can't think of a more real description of how I felt (and still feel) about her.  At Christmas that year I bought her tickets to see the Broadway musical "The Lion King" and was hoping she would ask me to be the one to see it with her.  She didn't ask me, but she didn't ask anyone else either, so I had a little bit of hope.

A couple of days later the two of us were headed to Paraguay together to meet up with our mutual friends, the Hernandez family.  The days leading up to the trip as well as the travel time itself were really good for us.  We spent a lot of time together, had some fantastic conversations and truly enjoyed each other's company without the stress of trying to impress.  The same went for the time in Paraguay itself; we often found ourselves hanging out together even though we were there to see our friends.  Like in Yosemite, we even found ourselves taking several pictures of each other and quite a few together.  But even though we were enjoying each others as friends, the romance was not quite there yet, and although she was opening up quite a bit, she was still holding back quite a bit.  There was one particular day while we were in Paraguay which I saw as a change between us: my birthday.  It was Sunday and we had a big service scheduled and I was going to be giving the sermon.  There was also going to be a church feast afterwards and Alise went into town with our friend Angel.  Later I found out he had a heart to heart conversation with her about her feelings towards me and it helped her realize that she did have feelings for me and she should move stop putting up emotional barriers towards me.  It wasn't like she fell in love with or anything, but it was a big shift for her mindset.  The service went great and the dinner was a blast, people in low-income countries know how to have a great time with what they have.

The next day however, was not as nice.  Alise was trying to work through her feelings and figure out what she felt towards me.  It was one of last days in Paraguay and she was annoyed with me all day.  Picking on every little thing I did and generally acting "bitchy" towards me, for lack of a better term.  When we were cooking dinner for the Hernandez family I finally had a few minutes alone with her and I confronted her about the way she was acting towards me and she admitted it was because she was confused and did have some feelings towards me.  I don't remember much more of the conversation after that because after she admitted it, the rest was a blur.

We started the journey home the next morning and I knew I had her cornered; we had a total of 18 hours of travel ahead of us with much of it sitting next to each other on airplanes.  Taking our time to be true friends to this point had made me comfortable enough with her that I could have this conversation with her.  To address her concerns about me and put myself out there.  It was a conversation which I needed to have with her or we would never be able to move on.  On our second flight I made my move and asked her the big question: What was holding her back from dating me?  As she has always been with me, she was honest and didn't hold back.  But I was up to the task and addressed every one of her concerns:  The biggest was her fear of long distance relationships, she had one which hurt her badly.  But I explained to her I had been involved in several in the past and I knew what was necessary to make them work.  Next was my divorce; not something young girls dream about when they are young.  I spent an hour or so talking about it, why it happened, what I did, my role in it and what I learned from it.  She was concerned about my: I am almost ten years older than her.  However, she is very mature for her age and I am pretty immature so it was a pretty easy answer.  Finally was the discussion about my looks, physically I was not exactly what she saw herself getting married to - primarily the bald part.  Not much I could do about it though - I would probably look worse with a comb-over.  By the end of that four hour flight we were both exhausted  but decided we would give dating another shot - and take it seriously this time.  And by the end of our trip home she did finally ask me to be her date to see the Lion King, and I happily took her.  About a year later we were married.