Good Intentions

Do you ever start out in a situation, with the best of intentions? The things you do are what you believe are the best you can do, according to the given situation, and the information that you have about it. Sometimes, however, another person in the same situation may have done something completely different. Or, there is another person involved in this situation, and they don't think that the choices you made were the best that you could have done. This is what has happened to me as of late.

I was dating (I'm not sure if we really were, but for the sake of convenience, I will say that we were) this guy in my ward, and I liked him a lot. I knew that I probably liked him more than he did me. I could deal with that. It seems to happen to me a lot, actually. At any rate, I was pretty sure that he liked me to some degree, or he wouldn't be spending time with me. Things seemed to be progressing pretty well, for a bit, but then some things happened, and we disagreed about some things, so we took a step back. I was unaware that we had changed that much, but I was going to let him take the lead in wherever we went. However, sometimes I get impatient, and I pushed it. One night, I must have pushed it too far. The next night, he seemed distant and almost irritated with me. I decided that instead of me trying and him not, I was simply going to sit back and let things happen as they may.
The next night, he worked late. I waited for a call, half of me not expecting a call, and the other half desperately hoping for it to come. A call did come, but not from him. It was my home teacher, and he wanted me to go dancing. Well, this is where I had to make a choice. I could go out with a friend, or I could sit and wait for a phone call that I was pretty sure wasn't going to come. What choice should I have made? I'm not sure. But I chose to go dancing with my friends. Well, as we were leaving, the guy that I was dating came out of his apartment and saw me leaving with this guy and a few other girls. Well, to make a long story short, he got mad, he accused me of things, I accused him of things, we sucked at communicating, and now he practically refuses to be in the same room as me (which is rather inconvenient seeing as I'm at his apartment a fair amount).

I guess all that wasn't too needed, but it made me feel better to write it. Either way, to the point of this post: my good intentions. In everything I did, I was not trying to hurt him. Heck, I liked him, why would I want to hurt him? However, to me, he sees everything I did as a scheme to be mean or spiteful. It's not true! He accused me of hanging all over another guy (the home teacher) the next day at church, which said a lot about how I saw me and him (the guy I was dating) and what had happened between us. However, I wasn't doing that to try to affect him in any way. I don't yet have many friends in the ward. I was simply sitting with a friend. I was pretty sure that me and this guy had finished dating. That's where our conversation the night before had led. I saw no reason to sit by myself at church and pine over him and be depressed about things that I can't change. In all honesty, I usually find a way to end a relationship, get over it, and be ready to be friends very quickly. I was tremendously affected by our angry and mean conversation the night before, but I realized that I had two choices: I could choose to be angry at him, or I could choose to see it as a simple misunderstanding between friends, that could be resolved and we could be friends again. I chose the second.

However, he chose the first. He is still mad at me. He says that he's disappointed, which I know also translates to mad. I tried to make amends, but to no avail. I think the problem is that he refuses to understand that I did have good intentions, all throughout everything that happened. Almost nothing I said or did was meant to spite or to hurt him. I don't know how to make him understand that, and to see my side of things.

What I have been thinking about a lot lately, as he obviously is not ready to forgive me anytime soon, is whether or not he ever will forgive me and decide that we can be friends again. I don't know him well enough to have seen him interact with someone who he had had a fight with, or someone that he had forgiven for something. I don't know if he is one of those people who take weeks, months, or even years to forgive someone.

All I know is that I hope that it can be sometime soon, or that he can at least be able to tolerate me. I always feel so bad when I go to his apartment and he goes somewhere away from me, but I was told not to worry about it and to keep coming around. Even though I have been told that, I still wait and hope for the day when we can all live in peace and harmony...haha ok cheesy! But fairly true.