A blind date....

Cory wrote this for one of his classes...its not exactly how I remember it, but it gets the gist of it down..lol.. the picture was taken right after Cory's mission.--before we broke up. (Yes we did break up!!)


Blind dates, that seems to be the way it works in my family. My mother and father were set up on a blind date and three days later they were engaged to be married! If my dad had had his way they would have been engaged after two days, but he had to wait for my mom to make sure it was right. They have now been married for 40 years.

In my senior year, my wife and I met on a blind date as well, but we did not get engaged three days later. I had been set up with Bonita (my wife) so that her friend (Cheri), the one we were double dating with, could check me out. After our blind date, I dated Cheri for a while but then I realized that Bonita was the one that I wanted to be with.

It was a lot of fun reading this chapter and looking at it in the context of meeting my wife and dating her former best friend. I was able to go thru all of the stages of relationship development that Knapp and Vangelisti talked about in the book. In this paper I will look at each of the coming together and coming apart, as it pertained to me meeting and getting together with my wife.

First was the coming together. After our first blind date the three of us did a lot of things together. This started the initiating stage and we all became good friends. Then Bonita went to Salt Lake for a few weeks in the summer to stay with family. This left me alone with Cheri and of course we moved to the experimenting phase. She would keep asking me more and more things about myself that I was not sure I wanted to share with another person. I knew that if I did, it would open me up to getting close to her. Finally, I decided that I would open up to her and that moved us into the intensifying phase. I believe that the interaction phase came when Bonita came back from Salt Lake and saw us holding hands. Luckily for me I knew that the bonding phase would never happen, because after getting to know Cheri I knew that I could never live with her.

As soon as I knew that It was not going to work out, I began to feel the stage of differentiating. I started to look at all of the differences that we had and how those differences moved us farther apart. Then we moved to the circumscribing stage where we limited our communication. It seemed like we had nothing in common to talk about anymore. This is the stagnating phase. When she moved away to go to college we moved into the avoiding stage. I don’t know if this was technically avoiding or more logistics. Although even with her moving away, she would come back on weekends and brakes from school and would try to act like we were still together. So I had to take it to the last phase and terminate the relationship by having the dreaded breakup talk.

It was nice to finally brake up officially Cheri so I could allow my feelings Bonita to express themselves. By the time this happened Bonita had gotten involved with another boy from her symphony group. We ended up in the initiating and intensifying stage for a lot longer then what it was with Cheri. Finally Bonita was talking to her "boyfriend" on the phone one day and said something about me to him and he said "you are always talking about Cory. Cory this, and Cory that why don’t you go be with Cory?" She said ok, and hung up the phone, never to be with him again. I just so happened to be there at her house when she had this conversation with him and she let me know what had happened. We tried for some time to continue in the “just good friends” phase for a time because I was going on a mission and could not get married until after that. All of the experimenting and intensifying just naturally moved our relationship into a coming closer together in our interaction. There was never a formal “Will you wait for me?” but we both knew that we would be together. After a long two years on a mission and a few bumps in the road after I returned (I wont go into detail or this paper will be way to long), we got engaged. This was an interesting experience for us because as far as Bonita was concerned we had broken up. We went right from the circumscribing and stagnation phase of coming apart to the bonding phase. Almost all of the people that knew us were amazed because they thought it was over. Now twelve years later and three boys, with one more boy one the way, we still know that we are “meant for each other” and that knowledge keeps us going through all of the hard times.

The other day I was in my social psychology class and he was giving us a test about schemas that are easily active in are mind. He asked us to write five things down about ourselves, then about our best friend, and then about our second best friend. When he got to this part I did not know what to do. I just sat there staring at all of the other people in the class writing things down. I realized that my wife is my best friend and I have no second best friend. There are many people that I would call acquaintances or may even introduce them as my friend to others, but there are no other people that I would call my best friend. That is reserved for my wife and none else.