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It should have been a disaster, but wasn't...

Atratus's picture

The idea for this thread is to post some potentially disasterous thing you've done where you threw caution to the wind and rather than having things fly back and hit you in the face, they worked out.

Case in point and my example: I was at Sanctuary one night, blowing off steam and drinking like a fish over a realtionship that had gone completely down the dumpster. While waiting in the bar line an aquaintance, someone I had known for a while, but not particularly well joined the queue behind me. I knew she had just gotten out of a disaster of a relationship and she knew my situation, too. For some irrational reason I said to her, "You know, there's something I've been meaning to do for a long time," and kissed her. We spent the rest of the night pretty much hiding in dark corners, snogging like we'd just invented the kiss. By all rights and reason I should have been slapped, and barring that the whole thing should have ended in disaster since we were both messed up and rebounding like flubber. We started [i]really[/i] dating a month later. Not two weeks after our first "official" date my apartment building damn near burns down. For lack of anywhere else to stay I ended up staying in her one bedroom apartment that she was sharing with a roommate until my apartment was open of human habitation again. The two of us lived in a single room that you could barely move in for three weeks without crewing eachother's faces off. I moved back into my apartment, but a few months later we decided that if we could get along in close quarters for three weeks like we did there was really no impediment to cohabitating. Valerian and I have been living together for two years and one month now.

Sometimes things just work out, even when good sense, experience and conventional wisdom say they shouldn't.

Typical cheesy high school crush on a girl named Biz.  Never expected it to work out, but it was stronger than a simple crush.  She always had a boyfriend and what made it worse was they were always older guys.

I took her to grad even though she had a bf, but was too messed up on mushrooms to really take advantage of the situation.  I went travelling for 6 months after grad, she went to Victoria for school (I live in Van.). 

I came back and worked for 9 months, saving up for more travelling.  Went away for 10 months, but just after I leave we find out via email (we had kept in contact throughout everything and had mutual friends) that we're both madly attracted to one another.  We were really dense, I suppose, to not notice it earlier.

10 months of travelling later I come back and she goes to Germany for a year...

I wait, lose my current gf (yay), watch my mom get married, and then she comes back to Canada.   Within 2 days we came clean face to face and it was grand.  A funny turning point was a couple weeks in, when I misheard her and thought she said "i love you" (the first of the relationship) and I went bright red and stammered.  She picked up on what i thought she said and retorted with "oh damn, I didn't mean to tell you that yet."  It was mutual.

We just celebrated 1.5 years together on 02/28/06

And I know that somehow I've messed up the timeline, but all in all it's been about 9.5 years that I've been nuts about her.  You could make a goddamn vomit-inducing teen date movie about this kind of stuff, man.

Potential disastrous outcome: being a whiny, pining, 'what-if'er who'd always wonder about that amazing chick he always wanted

Threw caution to the wind: stopped having sex with other women and managed to accomplish monogamy (her suggestion)  :P

Worked out: yup  d( 0.0 )b

I emailed the guy I'd had a crush on in high school.

He felt the same way.

Married 4 years now, together for 7  entirely. 4th anniversary this year.

I love stories like that...

When I was 20, I was in university in Ottawa in a program I hated and in a relationship that was only okay.  I made a snap decision one day to drop out of school, end the relationship and moved across the country to Vancouver (where I didn't know a soul) and started something completely new at SFU.  Everyone I knew thought I was nuts to drop out when I had only a year and a half to go, but I just couldn't do it.

I became a different person out here, made some great friends, and had the time of my life.  My program was a much better fit and I got a lot out of my academic life.

I also met my current partner, also attending SFU.  He'd come from ONtario as well, and had come here to sort himself out and leave behind his previous life (we met at the bus stop, no less!).  He would have hated me if he'd met me before, and vice versa.  Although I was quite young (only 22), and initially worried that I wasn't ready for a serious relationship, and he also worried that I was too young (he typically dated older), we gave it a try and it was amazing. 

Since then life has taken many strange turns, we've moved around a LOT,  both ended up in career paths we never would have dreamed of (and not much to do with our degrees--but neither of us regrets the liberal arts!).   

We're now going on 8 years together.  Definitely don't regret my "stupid" decision 10 years ago.