Johannah Dips Her Toe Into the Dating Pool

Johannah. Holy smokes.  What a difference from before her mission to after her mission.  She is a confident, funny, friendly, social animal now....versus being an insecure, funny, not-so-friendly, hide-in-her-room-and-watch-Netflix college student before.  I mean, it takes a special kind of person to sign up to be a Resident Assistant at BYU, and she has taken the job and run with it.  In fact, she's now the popular girl in her dorm, with all the residents wanting to hang out with her and be her friend.  And no wonder--she makes them Sunday pancakes...and invites the partnering male dorm floor residents ;-)  It's like the person that she was always meant to be has finally arrived and is taking the world by storm.

Over Thanksgiving, I had four tickets to a Michigan hockey game.  John and I figured it would be fun for the kids to go, thinking Ethan and Rebecca, and Mark and Allison.  But I remembered that Hannie loves hockey games too, so I tried to buy her a ticket, but I couldn't find a single.  So I bought another one.

I needed a date for Hannie.  The thought immediately came to mind "Axel Lichtenberg".  Yes, that's a boy.  His parents were our realtors here in Michigan, they live in one of the wards in our stake, and Hannah had met him at RA orientation back in August because he is an RA as well (although in Helaman while Hannah is in Heritage).  I knew that he knew Mark from the YSA ward here in Ann Arbor and actually really likes Mark, and since Mark was coming, I figured it would be an easy invite.

Of course, that whole thought process took about 2 seconds in my mind, and without checking with anyone, I emailed the Lichtenberg parents to see if Axel would be around and would he like to go.  Brother Lichtenberg responded quickly, and said that Axel said "Yes!"

Problem was (and this should come as no surprise) Mark hadn't checked with Allison about the hockey date, and she had made plans with her family.  So Mark and Allison backed out at the last minute.  #Awkward. However, I hear that Ethan and Rebecca made good double daters.  However, Mark did let Axel know that his wasn't some kind of set up.  That it was an honest mistake that Mark couldn't come.

Axel

I don't know if Hannie was nervous or not since it wasn't a real date, but from my spies, I hear that they got along great.  They were talking the whole night together.  And they were very comfortable together.  Hannie came home a little star-struck, I think.  She really liked Axel.  If anything, she was happy to look UP at a boy ;-)

So the next day, during church, Mark got a text from Axel asking him if he thought Hannah would like to go out with him once they got back to BYU.  Mark and Ethan carefully composed the reply text, and within a week, Hannah had a date with Axel.  A surprise date too where he gave her two letters as clues to the date:  R and S.

Hannah has had lots of opportunities to have boyfriends over the years, but she is as picky about boys as I am picky about green vegetables.  She doesn't give boys much time before she Judge Judys them out of her life.  As a consequence, she doesn't have much dating experience.

Too, she moves into the friend zone almost immediately with every boy.  No joke every guy likes her because she's herself, she doesn't play mental games, and she's fun.  So most of her friends at school are boys.  Lots and lots of boys.

But here was a boy that she really liked. Axel just might be more busy than Mark or Hannah are as students (and that is saying a LOT).  He's goal oriented (he wants to be a neurosurgeon and go to Michigan for medical school).  And he's from a state other than Utah.

Some major hurdles though: she suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (compliments of generations of my family having it as well), and GERD.  And when she gets around a cute boy, she breaks out in hives.  Like, they literally crawl up her neck.  So getting asked out by a cute boy who checks a lot of the boxes on Hannah's "husband" list is pretty stressful.

I took a video of Hannah when I was in Utah, the morning before her second date with Axel.  I have watched this a million times, because it makes me laugh every time:

The first date?  Making soap.  He put his arm around her...and she did nothing.

Second date?  I can't remember.  But she did get a hug at the end of the date.

Third date?  Going swing dancing.  As it turns out, Axel teaches swing dance.  So he took her to a club in downtown Provo (where coincidentally she ran into a boy who had just dumped her a couple of weeks earlier--and he was there with a date), and she had the time of her life.

I had been riding her about reaching out to him...literally.  Like take his hand, or rub his arm.  But Hannah, while confident in all arenas of her life (she calls herself a lion), is a kitten when it comes to men.

However, that night, late at night, I got this text:

Hannah had finally kissed a boy!  It was a sweet, on the lips, kiss.

She consequently couldn't sleep for the next three nights ;-)

However, Christmas break was coming up, and it was almost a month before they went out again.  It's been unclear if Axel really likes Hannah.  Just when we think he's moved on, he calls her up again.

Enter Daniel.  Daniel is one of Hannie's RA friends (I should say, he's one of Hannie's TWENTY male RA friends), and he picked her up from the airport after Christmas.  He mentioned that the 5 Browns were coming to SLC the end of January, and she told him how much she loves the 5 Browns.  He then asked her if she wanted to go.  It could be a date--it might not be.

Back to Axel.  So at the advice of "Glo's Ethan", she sent Axel a text when she got back to school, just asking him about his holiday.  He invited her out again.

Okay, this was it.  I told Hannah that she needed to give him something.  He was planning all these dates, and she hadn't even held his hand yet.  She needed to be her cute, funny self, and not her nervous, does-he-like me self.

Again, a surprise date.  She could hardly believe it when they pulled up to a roller rink!  If there's anywhere that Hannah feels comfortable, it's roller skating!

In kitten form however, she didn't tell him that she's a roller skating pro, and she just stayed next to him the entire night, skating very slowly and boring.

And at her door, he kissed her again.  But he tried to really kiss her.  And Hannah freaked out a little. Or a lot.  And biffed the whole thing.  And he said, "It's okay.  It happens.  Let's just hug."

And that's when the Mama Hammer came down on Hannah.

Now let me express that I am extremely grateful that my girls call me with all the fun details of their love lives (and pretty much every other detail of their lives).  Glo calls me more, even scheduling the time so that she doesn't get bumped by her brothers, but Hannah is good about calling me after dates. And it's so fun to relive new love <3  However, while Glo would follow my advice to the "T" (and had a steady boyfriend within a week), Hannah is less willing to listen to me and do what I tell her to do.

And when I shared what had happened to her with the brothers, they both had the same reaction:  he's thinking she's not interested, and he's going to move on.

We were just sick about it.

So I sent Hannah a tough-love text, telling her that she needed to step up and be confident and express her feelings to him.

I even sent her a script of what to say.

But while she didn't use the script (I knew that she could have it memorized within seconds), she did call him up and ask him out on a date that she was planning.  A date where she could be herself and feel comfortable.

He said yes, and her creative, brilliant mind began turning.  Where does she feel the most comfortable?  At the library.

So she created a library scavenger hunt for the two of them in the Provo library, a place neither had ever visited.

She picked him up at his door and drove them to a crepe shop in Orem.  I guess it's a pretty fun and tasty place, and they both ordered "The Blind Date" crepe, not knowing what they would get.  Axel loved the place AND the food.

Then it was onto the library.  Hannah had the most brilliant ideas written on slips of paper that he got to choose.

• Find a "learn to draw" book and each try and draw the picture.
• Find a book by an author with your same first name.
• Find a poem on a certain topic chosen by your date (Axel chose death, Hannah chose animals)
• Find a book of haikus, and write one yourself.
• Find a book in your mission language and read it out loud to the other person.

There were some other ideas as well, but those are the ones I remember.  Turns out, the last idea, the language idea, turned out to be the biggest hit.  While Axel could get through Spanish fairly well, poor Hannie had to read Russian written with Cyrillic letters.  I mean, I know that "Moscow" looks like "MockBa" in Russian, so I guess it turned out pretty hilarious.  Then, there were phonetic pronunciations of the Russian words, so Axel came up with the idea to have her read those and see if he could figure out what she was saying.

The best example?  There was something from the phrase book about "if you want to be like James Bond" so the phrase was "I'd like a martini.  Shaken, not stirred."  That's the one Hannah chose.  Axel listened, and his first reaction?  "Okay, I think we're getting drunk." ;-)

It sounds like it was super funny.

So Axel had to leave because he had a presentation at his job (or something like that), but Hannah had one more slip in her pocket:  Find a How-To book and learn how to do something new.  Hannah's how to?  How to kiss.

I'm not sure how it went down, but he ended up showing her how to really kiss.  And they kissed right there in the library #PrinceAndMe.

*****sigh*****

And she must not have done too shabby of a job, because he kissed her again when she walked him to his door.

But through all of this, I could tell that something was going on in Hannie's head.  That she wasn't as excited about him as she had been in the beginning.

Enter Christian.

Christian moved into Heritage a couple of weeks ago, and Hannah was the one to check him in.  She noticed what floor he would be living on and knew that he would be in her ward.  She also found out that he recently returned from his mission in Mexico, and he's from New Hampshire.  Like, his family lives there. #NotUtah

So last Sunday, Hannah's good friend, Karlie, wasn't at church because she'd gone home for MLK weekend, and Christian came over to sit by Hannah.  Okay.  And when the bishopric passed out slips, asking everyone to confidentially answer if they'd been studying Come Follow Me on their own, he lamented that he'd better get better about doing it.

But then she invited him to Pancake Sunday, and he came.  And they ended up staying afterwards and talking for two hours.  Talking about really deep things like the new Come Follow Me program, and the temple, and whatever else.  And soon after, he texted her, asking her if she'd like to come over and study Come Follow Me with him.

So tomorrow night, she has invited him over for tacos and games along with her cousin, May, and Layton Barney.  Yep, Layton.

I asked Amber how Layton is doing, coming fresh off his mission and heading to BYU within a couple of weeks.  She said that he's not dating, doesn't ever see his roommate, and is just all-over meh.  I told her that Hannah does lots of social things with her residents, and she'd be happy to invite him.  But Hannah went one step further by inviting him over to her apartment...by calling him.  Like, on the phone.  I don't think he's looking for a girlfriend, but if anything, he will have a very good friend in Hannie.

And now that Hannah is seeing that other boys are interested in her, she's not so stressed out about Axel which is always a good thing. And she's realizing she has some other desires in a boyfriend, good conversation being near the top of the list.

As much as I know Hannah feels like she's ready to be married, I kind of like following along with both hers and Glo's love lives.  It's better than the Bachelorette, that's for sure ;-)