By Popular Demand...

...I bring you Bachelor #2.

I was on the dating website one day, and I got an email. It said “Do you or did you work at Acme?” (which is, obviously, not the company's real name). It freaked me out a little, because Acme is the place where we lease space, and it is HUGE. Who on earth would know me enough to recognize me from a picture, but not enough to talk to me when I'm at work? I looked closer at the picture, and figured it out.

When we moved in, we had a lot of cubicle rearranging to do. We have floor to ceiling cubes with doors, and so it’s quite the process to move stuff. This guy – let’s call him Construction Boyfriend – was one of the contractors who did the moving. Because we had so much to do, he was around a lot. We got to be friends because he was cute and SO funny. He would do extra stuff for us, and Marlene would buy him beer. He figured me out right away, and used to tease me about how high maintenance I was. Anyway, he had recently started his own construction business, and so once summer rolled around, he left and went to work for himself. That was almost three years ago.

I replied, and we went out for beers that weekend. It was awesome, because we sat and talked forever and there was never any awkwardness. We laughed a lot and it was really as if no time had passed. It was a great evening, which ended with us hanging out at my house, drinking beer, talking and listening to music until we were both almost asleep. Ever the gentleman, when he left, he kissed me on the forehead and covered me with a blanket.

So we started talking more. Unlike some people, he is a phone person and likes to talk every day. He calls me and returns my calls promptly and we always have stuff to talk about. I can tell him the stupidest stories about my day – and believe me, I have a lot of stupid stories – and he really listens and he laughs and gives me a hard time if I deserve it. It’s a fine line, you know – funny hard time vs. mean hard time – and he’s never mean.

He makes me laugh. He’s tall. He works really hard. He is so sweet. He fixes stuff and builds stuff, and I love that. He’s a strong person, but not to the point where he won’t accept help if he needs it. I know a lot about him, because he always answers my questions and he tells me all kinds of stuff. Even, sometimes, secrets. When he hugs me, he lays his cheek on the top of my head. He tells me I look cute in a baseball hat and my glasses. He’s a music geek like I am, and when I played him a recording of me singing, he asked me for a copy because he thinks it’s “soothing.” He doesn’t get annoyed when I get excited about watching “Tommy Boy” for the first time in years and keep blurting out lines from the movie and then apologizing. He’ll drive an hour to see me at 9 on a Friday night, on the spur of the moment, because he wants to see me. He’ll drive an hour to see me on a Sunday night after he’s been at a wedding extravaganza in the mountains all weekend and is totally hung over, but he wants to see me and because he told me before he left that we’d do something on Sunday when he got back. So obviously, he follows through and is true to his word.

I know. Doesn’t he sound great? He really is. The catch is that I don’t know whether he wants this to be a “girlfriend” situation or a “girl friend” situation. I’m not going to ask him, because I’m not that girl who always has to have the “where are we” talk after like a month, and because I know that he has stuff going on in his life that takes priority over me or us. And that’s fine. For now, I just like spending time with him and no matter what ends up happening, I’m happy that he’s in my life.