I went back to my own book.

I am navigating a long distance connection right now, and a few weeks in I did something I did not expect to do. I pulled out The Loved Girl and started working through it.

I wrote that book. I know what is on every page. And I still needed it, which tells you something about how this works. Writing a thing down does not exempt you from having to live it. If anything it makes it harder to pretend, because the prompt is in your own handwriting and you cannot claim nobody warned you.

Distance takes away the thing most of us rely on

When someone is in front of you, a lot of the evaluating happens without your permission. You watch how he treats a server. You notice who he is when he is tired. You see the ordinary Tuesday version, which is the version you would actually be choosing.

Distance removes all of that. What you have instead is words, timing, and consistency. That can be clarifying, because you cannot confuse chemistry with character when chemistry has nowhere to happen. But it cuts the other way too, and this is the part I had to sit with. When there are gaps, your imagination fills them. And your imagination is not neutral. It fills them with whatever you have been hoping for.

The question I did not want to answer

One of the prompts in that book asks whether you are responding to who someone is or to how much attention he is giving you. I wrote that question for other women. It found me anyway.

Because attention is abundant at a distance. Texts, calls, the good morning message, the thinking about you at nine at night. All of it is real, and none of it is the same as demonstrated life. A woman can feel deeply pursued and still know almost nothing about how a man behaves when something is inconvenient for him.

That is not cynicism. That is just what discernment is: the willingness to ask a question you would rather not ask, at the point where you still have room to hear the answer.

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.Proverbs 4:23

Guard is not the same as close

That verse gets quoted at women in two unhelpful directions. One says do not let anyone in. The other treats guarding as optional if the feeling is strong enough.

Guarding is neither. A guard watches. A guard stays awake and pays attention and lets the right things through. You can be open and paying attention at the same time. In fact that is the only combination that ever works, because being closed is not safety, it is just a different way of missing what is in front of you.

Where I actually am

I do not know how this goes. That is the honest answer and I am not going to dress it up. What I know is that I am doing it awake this time, with my own questions in front of me, praying about it instead of just feeling my way through it.

The thing I keep coming back to, from the page I wrote and did not fully understand until now: you are loved, chosen, and worthy before anyone else ever says so. If that is settled, a connection is something you get to evaluate. If it is not settled, a connection becomes an audition, and you will start abandoning small pieces of yourself to keep passing it.

So I went back to my own book. If you are in something new, or something long distance, or something you cannot quite read yet, it might be worth going through it too. Not to talk yourself out of hope. To make sure hope is not the only thing you are working with.

With you on the journey,
Autumn