For many people, online dating can be strange. For men, women can be picky and occasionally stand-offish. For women, men can be skeevy and hard to deal with (to put it gently). However, on certain rare occasions, good personalities can be found and good conversations can be had. For me, I found my best friend through it.
The beginning of Summer 2015, I was back in Milford, Pennsylvania. When you lived in a town where you knew nobody, you often became very lonely. Not to mention, the only person I knew in that town, I had broken up with seven months ago. As lonely people do, I decided to join the OkCupid dating site to see if I can find anyone who can keep my interest for these lonely days. I didn’t have too much idea what I was looking for, but I was messaged quite frequently.
Halfway through the month of June, I received a message from a user named hsnover (I would later learn that his full name was Layton Hill Snover.) At first, I was put off by him a little. He sent long messages and constantly switched topics, but there was something about him that kept me from ignoring his messages. He was forward and sure about himself, and he seemed genuinely curious in learning about me.
So, one Monday night, I decided (after another date cancelled on me) to ask if he wanted to have a short notice date that night. It was around 6 p.m. I had no idea how far away he lived, and before I knew it, he drove an hour and 30 minutes to my house just to go on a short date with me. We ended up getting ice cream at one of my favorite ice cream shops before going to see "Mad Max: Fury Road" in an empty theater.
The rest of the summer was spent together as much as possible. Layton and I got very close in many ways. Every other weekend we tried to get together and when we weren’t together, we tried to Skype as much as possible. To most, we were a summer fling, to us, we were just having a lot of fun, despite some of the hardships we both went through to see each other.
Layton often had a fairly strict home life. This equaled out to a lot of stress and anxiety in his life that he found very hard to alleviate. As this new soul in his life, I tried to change that a little and give a little more of a positive and supportive side to his life. As he tells me every day, I believe I managed to help him, even a little. For me, my parents were being rather stubborn on driving. So, he often drove to pick me up and drove to drop me off. Each trip would equal out to about three hours back and forth. So, two trips would be six hours a day.
It was a lot of driving, but it was with good company. Managing to be alone for those long trips allowed us to talk and express feelings we couldn’t during our times at his house. Ultimately, our “summer fling” ended as school started to close in. I was going to end up a good three hours from him and things were getting confusing. He wasn’t talking to me. I was hurt and confused. I finally ended up asking him about his sudden change of heart. He explained his worried and fears. He explained that he simply wasn’t in a good place for a relationship at that time. I understood. It would have been a hard long-distance relationship and, like me, he had recently ended a long-term relationship and wasn’t sure he was ready for another relationship just yet.
We moved on. I started seeing other people as well as he. I dated someone. So did he. However, we stayed in contact. We texted, we laughed, we Skyped. Our summer long fling had us in a strange relationship. We were too close to each other to just let go but we were so sure that a relationship wouldn’t work out that we had to move on, at least emotionally. I suppose that’s when our real friendship started. Feelings still linger between us, but we aren’t shy about it. I think that’s what makes our relationship so strong. We don’t tiptoe around our feelings and we don’t keep it all in. We communicate and share and keep each other open to our thoughts.
What I’m trying to get to by telling you all this, is to keep your mind open to people. There are always going to be those that turn you off from a conversation. There will always be people who simply can’t hold a conversation, much less a relationship. However, a friendly person you meet on a dating site might not be dating material, but they could definitely be best friend material.
