I had screwed up my courage and set my face like flint and I was ready to see her again. I hadn’t seen her in person since we broke up six months ago and I was prepared to not tip my hand at all. I would be stoic in her presence. I had done a pretty good job of getting over her, but I wasn’t about to show anything other than 100 percent over her to her. I was at a party at a friend’s house and I knew she would be there. We had too many friends in common for her not to be there. So, I had plenty of time to prepare for the awkwardness and uncomfortable conversation that comes with talking to a former girlfriend. When she asked if she could talk to me in private, I knew it was time to put the poker face on. I had mentally rehearsed for just about any conversation I would have with her. I was prepared for just about anything she would say.

Except for this.

She told me she missed me and wanted to get back together. I hadn’t prepared for this at all. I kept up the poker face and said I’d have to think about it. Inside, my mind was already off in a hundred directions. During the past six months, I had boxed up all the memories and emotions of our relationship and stored them away in a locker in my brain. Now I had to choose whether or not I wanted to take the key and let them out again. During that time, dating had been mostly fruitless (truthfully, I was actually enjoying not being in a relationship), but I had started to develop some new crushes. Now, I had to decide if I wanted to prematurely cancel those potential unknowns and go back to the known.

Our relationship had been pretty good, but at the same time, this was now the second time she had caught me totally off-guard, breaking up with me and now suddenly showing up again in my life. Was I prepared to re-enter a relationship knowing full well that she had the potential to surprise me yet again? Or, did I want to turn my back on something that admittedly, was pretty good when it was good? Were we going to just go right back to the same relationship we had before with the same level of intensity as if nothing had happened, or was it going to take some time to re-build the relationship? Was I willing to take the risk of giving this up to chase after girls that had no interest in me yet again?

I agonized over these questions for several days. I asked a couple friends for advice, but no one seemed to have any clear-cut advice one way or the other. There seemed no obvious answer.

Finally, after vacillating between the choices, I decided to try and ease back into dating her again. I was hoping we could just casually date for a little bit and see where things went, but I couldn’t follow my own rules. When you’ve been that close to someone before, it’s virtually impossible to throttle back your feelings. Before long, we were together again and acting just like we were a year ago as if the six months that we were apart was just another summer in Florida.

But everything was not the same. Six months apart had opened our eyes to a lot of other things besides each other. We were both undergoing personal crises that churned underneath our surfaces that we held from each other. The relationship was growing more and more intense and the prevailing attitude became “this has to work. Or else” The level of committment in the relationship was soaring too high and there was no next level like marriage or even engagement realistically in sight. After an easy spring quarter, college had returned in intensity and ferocity with a punishing fall quarter. I was, again, having a difficult time balancing my personal life, my academic life, and my romantic life. All three were starting to buckle under the pressure and it was only a matter of time before something would give.

In so many areas of my life, I was holding the lid firmly down on a pot in a rolling boil at the end of 1996.