Although a  year and some ago I thought I had truly gotten over the pain of the EJ debacle, I still managed to spend Christmas stateside attending a wedding, hanging with mutual friends and kind of hoping I would run into her. Neither happened, and when push came to shove I couldn’t bring myself to take the short hop across town to the city where she now lived. Coming into 2012 then, the target was to resolve a number of the other friendzoneships  I had somehow gotten sucked in over the years.

Clarity would end up being delivered spectacularly through the year – hanging with R when she passed through my city in March confirmed what we both knew since our undergraduate days, that we were great as wingmen/women for each other, but lousy at everything else besides, my hankering for my Dalglish conjecture came and went  – appropriately chided of course, P and I managed to let crazy work schedules and a significant time difference wreck what had seemed like a pretty good start, and then there was L.

L was the kick up the backside I needed: smarts, attractiveness, a big heart for God and children and an appreciation of the arts ensured she ticked all my critical boxes. It helped that she was also in the same city (for a change!) and we had similar work interests. Being around her put the last eighteen months in perspective and showed me quite starkly what I had missed by failing to move on. We didn’t quite work out – my penchant for complicated women rearing it’s head one more time – but the one thing meeting her did was finally hammer home what my wing-women extraordinaire Izz  & Dee had harped on all year round – that I needed to get off my backside and explore.

Once again, there have been lessons learned this year – that there is a shed load of stuff I need to learn about me, about women, about my long term direction and the type of woman I am attracted to.  That, and a paradigm shift of sorts, perhaps best articulated by Clay Christensen in his book How Will You Measure Your Life:

The path to happiness (in a relationship) is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.

I suspect that when/if the annals of my life are written in the future, 2012 will feature prominently as the year of the big reset, the year wherein the penny dropped. All told, it’s been a year of pruning, spring cleaning, gaining clarity and working out the toxins and nascent hurts from the past. I suspect 2013 will be the year of learning and re-learning… And hopefully finding and building…