My So-Called Pursuit of Mason

(Posted early because I'm impatient and I love this post)

Mason tells me that, while there was a part of him that liked me ever since our late-night Sunday conversation, he didn't start thinking about it until later in the semester. He was interested in another girl, who actually had some real-life connection to his life, unlike some girl who wasn't in his ward, classes, circle of mutual friends, etc. In his words: "It just didn't make sense...oh my gosh, we're Vulcans!" (I thought it was funny. I'm writing this for me, not you.)

So, it was up to me and my awesome social skills to make this happen.



Yeah. This was already sounding like a great plan.

At first, it mostly consisted of liking his statuses and such on Facebook to remind him that, you know, I existed. Remember my birthday party? I planned that specifically so I could invite him. (And also to make the chocolate peanut butter cake without my roommates and I eating the whole thing ourselves.) I noticed that our ward prayers were at similar times, so I started coming early (I was the only person in my ward to be early to ward prayer, ever) in case I saw him.

I ran into him on campus once, buying tickets to see him sing in Men's Chorus, and he walked me home. I ran into him in the Cougareat...once. Actually, I saw him in the Cougareat a lot, but I usually was too shy to go up and be like, hey, can I sit with you? Or something totally normal like that. Usually I defaulted to my usual method of dealing with crushes, which is, "Sit in their general vicinity and hope they see you and come talk to you despite no indication that you know they exist or wish to have a conversation."



A little while after my birthday party, Mason began initiating contact on his own. He asked me on a date to see a different BYU choir sing. After Stake Conference, my "hang out in his general vicinity" plot actually worked, and he walked me home from the HFAC to Wyview (about a 20 minute walk, for the 99% of my readers who wouldn't know). That was one of the times we stayed outside and talked for an hour or two. When I finally came inside, my roommates asked, "What do you guys talk about for so long???"

"Leafcutter ants," I replied.

(It was only one of many random topics we had touched on, but it produced the most amusing reaction.)

The day before Thanksgiving Break, he sent me a Facebook message about a dance that was going on. (Reminds me of a line from a Taylor Swift song, "I'm not much for dancing, but for you I did.") At some point in this story, he asked me to be his date to the BYU Men's Chorus Gala. The Gala was fun, but I felt a little frustrated about how just-friends everything was seeming. He had mentioned, during one of our conversations about everything, that he tends to overthink things like this, so I hoped that it was just that and not a lack of interest on his part.

Over Christmas, I decided to step it up a notch. (Stepping it up a notch, for me, roughly translates to what other girls do with no problems whatsoever.) I texted him "Merry Christmas". Bold, right? I know, I know, I'm shameless. I might even have added a smiley face! This led to a lot of texting and Facebooking over Christmas break, to the extent that I was beginning to think that maybe he likes me too. But, true to typical form, I overthought this enough that I wasn't entirely sure.



I came back from Christmas Break, excited for the guitar class that we had signed up for together. On Thursday, he walked me home after class and, as usual, we lingered outside my apartment talking. My finger started to do a weird thing with my circulation, so I invited him inside (gasp!) so that my hands would stop freezing up. (Yes, I in part owe my first real relationship to a circulation problem.) He stayed until midnight, talking with me as usual.

One of the many things we talked about was the ridiculous way people at BYU approach the concept of crushes, dating, marriage, etc. (This got oversimplified by my roommate to "Jaclyn had a guy over and they were talking about marriage!!!" in the Relief Society gossip mill. Everyone looked at my left hand. One girl GRABBED my left hand.) In particular, we both established that we didn't see anything wrong with dating pre-missionary guys. In general, of course. Hypothetically.

On Friday, it was about 15 C out in January, so I went outside to enjoy it. I told him about this, and when he said it sounded nice, I took the (gasp) opportunity to invite him to come join me. He did, and afterwards I went to his Men's Chorus rehearsal and then to his apartment (he had moved closer to campus, to New Heritage) before I went to see Cyrano de Bergerac for my French class. He did not join me, since he was hanging out with his Wyview roommates that evening.

The next day, we Facebooked each other all day (well, all of my day, I suppose he might have woken up at a reasonable hour of the afternoon...or morning) and then he invited me to see Captain America with him at the dollar theater. What happened at the movie? ...we watched the movie. That was it.

But, since I'm getting down to the day-by-day part of the story, you know it's coming, right? Well, here we are at Sunday. Shortly before leaving for a CES fireside, I started texting him. As I had hoped, this led to him asking where I was sitting, and we attended the fireside together and then walked back to my apartment. I invited him inside, where we again began talking about everything. At about 10:30, Alex came out of her room and started staring us down from the kitchen, sipping a glass of water. At 10:45, she cleared her throat and said, "Well, it's quarter to eleven on a school night, so..." (This part of the story always gets incredulous looks when I tell it to other college students.)

Mason and I obligingly went outside, sat down by the stairwell, and continued talking. However, Utah was experiencing this bizarre thing called "winter" for once in January, and we started getting cold. We went for a walk, but that just seemed to make us colder, so we went to the only building open to both genders past midnight - the laundromat.

And we kept talking.

I was starting to get tired, and I had early classes the next day, but I could tell that this conversation had potential to go somewhere, and I decided that I was not going to bed until either he left or this got resolved.

At about 3 am, Mason said something along the lines of "We are probably the best people in the world at talking about everything and nothing at the same time." I thought that was true, because I was pretty sure that he liked me and knew I liked him, we had been talking for 8 hours straight, and we STILL hadn't said anything about it - but there was still the tiny bit of doubt in my mind that made me unsure if he was referring to that. The best response my brain managed to come up with was "yeah", which he probably interpreted as a very encouraging and clear signal, right? Yeah, I didn't think so either.

We fell silent for a few seconds, while I sat there kicking myself, then he kind of laughed. I asked why, and he said, "Well, with how logical we both are about this (a reference to our previous conversation about the typical BYU attitude vs what makes sense), you'd think it would be easier." Suddenly, I was sure I knew exactly what he meant by that.

My brilliant response? "Yeah".

Then he held out his hand, and I took it.

The next 15 minutes or so were alternately spent finally stating what we had spent days of conversation dancing around, and laughing at our own ridiculousness in fits of 3 am-induced hilarity. Finally, we went to bed. I woke up the next morning and thought, "Did that actually happen?"

And that is the (very very long and probably overly detailed for your taste) story of how Mason and I started dating.