Off-Grid Artist
Member
This is the most recent experience with courting a potential second wife, which I feel was mostly successful and probably still a situation which is “in play.”
First let me preface this by saying that I do not approach many women seriously for potential courtship as a second wife. I do flirt frequently and regularly and maintain a “non-friend” status with most younger, unmarried women. Sticking my toe in the door is normal for me. In general most women I flirt with are never going to make it anywhere with me, because I own land, have a growing young family, a strong business with great clients, and a very grounded emotional and spiritual life.
What I want to get across is that where I’m at in life, most women whom I might at first consider to be potential second wives pretty quickly disqualify themselves as more of a distraction or detriment to the life God is building for me rather than a benefit or enrichment.
In this case, it was a young woman who I saw on occasion at her job in a bakery café. I’ll call her Ell. She was drawn to talking with me, when she had time to. She offered me free pastries at the end of the night “because we just feed them to the pigs” after the end of the day. We had real chemistry starting way back before we were speaking for real. At first I thought she must be a Mennonite, like many of the coworkers there, but she is nondenominational Protestant.
So we had occasional, limited engagements for quite awhile. I went in there specifically for a quiet place to work, not to engage. I didn’t know her schedule but she was often there and I liked that. This was probably once a month.
There was a period of about four to six months when I didn’t go in there. During this time I was grinding hard, building structures on my land, building structures on a friend’s homestead, and pulling very long nights of client work. It was a gauntlet. I burned off about twenty pounds – coming back into my normal range - eventually shaved off my beard, moved away from glasses and back into contacts. The negative effects of several years of fatigue energy and lack of fitness I had gone through while building up my homestead and putting in too long hours to accommodate this were fading away and I was returning to my normal more focused self with more self-care.
One day about two months ago I returned back into that cafe on a quiet “out-of-office” work day with my laptop. She momentarily looked at me like a new person then realized it was me and remembered my name very quickly. It was a slow day there. Immediately she asked me “so, you have a wife and kids?” That was the moment of realization that I needed to escalate the relationship into something real.
She hung out with me for probably fifteen minutes at my table, and we talked about family and the Bible. She mentioned that she doesn’t know why she believes what she believes. So, I got her number and we made plans to get together and talk about life.
We were texted pretty frequently. I was very keenly aware of the possibility of falling into the friend-zone, so I tried to maintain a flirty personal relationship. It was very difficult to get her on the phone, she said that her phone doesn’t get great reception at her parent’s home. I believe that to be true. We are all very rural and I often have this problem.
Texting sucks. It’s not a way to build a relationship. I wasn’t keen on it. I keep trying to keep the original framing that we are going to hang out together one-on-one.
So she tells me that her brother is coming home for Christmas. She’s taking two weeks off from work for the holidays and her family has a lot of plans. I’m not sure this was an excuse to avoid getting together, I believe it to be true. I hang back and keep distance.
She invites my family out to go Christmas caroling with her. I’m on the fence because we don’t observe Christmas, however my wife and I have been discussing which Christmas songs we actually do like and respect and which we do not. So, this is a chance to explore that. I take my family out.
Ell was cute. She was nervous to meet my wife. She’s attracted to me, she tilts her hips towards me when we talk, she’s opening up her body language. We get invited to her female mentor / work boss’ home for dancing that night. She’s cute as a button, she’s wearing a nice form-fitting attire with a little skinning knife on her hips. I’m silently scrutinizing the little flecks of lint on her maroon sweater. That makes me snobbier than her, which is probably very healthy and makes her more attractive to me.
So I like swing dance and Hebrew circle dance. My wife also does, we’re pretty good at it and polished. When we get there we take the floor and everyone else moves back to the walls and we have the floor to ourselves. We did a good job, we dominated the space. They are all very happy to have us, they love my children, and generally it is a warm inviting space.
We are still in that time period when her family has plans, and she has invited me into her personal life. However, I don’t want to be a part of her personal life. I want to explore if she has high enough value to potentially invite her into my life that I’m building with God’s direction. That being said, my wife and I both realize that she’s vetting me through her close personal friend circle.
The next week we are again invited over for New Years Eve. Again, not necessarily a holiday I want my family to observe because of the pagan roots of it, but New Years Eve in America doesn’t have too much of those attributes. And I already had an invitation to a game night which would have been the alternative, so again I take my family over there. We got there very late. This house is a reasonably good environment for young people to group-date in. When I was their age I lived in a social situation party house which was similar, but theirs is full of board games and Bible studies and mine back then was full of alcohol, drugs, and casual sex with rotating partners. So, who am I to judge.
This was a tricky night for me. Obviously at midnight I kiss my wife every year. It’s our thing. So I’m thinking that I need to keep the door open for putting Ell and me in a place where maybe we are able to escalate. I’m also mildly interested to see if she’s going to kiss her regular dance partner, a tall insecure young man who has eyes for her.
Both nights I have been over there I’ve been careful to interact in a way that I’m trying to make myself a regular dance partner with Ell. My wife is hanging back and joining in the dance about a quarter of the time. Ell is holding my hand when she doesn’t need to, between songs. When we come together occasionally we’re ending up with our fingers intertwined. She leans towards me. She’s not very actively social in front of her friends. She’s quiet and a little withdrawn even from then. I try to flirt with her openly, I am doing what I can to be charming and not focused on her, but talking to the other people there, meeting her male friends, and fill the space with my presence without being overwhelming. In retrospect I feel that I did this very well.
I try to create a scenario with her alone outside by inviting her to look at the new truck I’m buying. She brings two young men. So it’s a nice big truck, too big for my tastes and it’s jacked-up which I don’t need or care for, but it’s a strong good truck which will be good in the backcountry for my wife. It will be safe for my kids and can sit 8-9 people with it’s third row, so it’s something I don’t need now, but I will need it in a few years. And I’m being given a deal I can’t refuse.
So I use this as a segue to mention that I’m going to need it in the future because I plan to have twelve children. I say that directly in front of her male friends. I’m being pretty straightforward for a nonalcoholic party of very young people with a smattering of adults my age. That night I again bring up the “date” but I do it in front of her mentor boss, Rachel. Because Ell has told me that she doesn’t know her schedule in advance and that she has all this time off. Rachel immediately tells me that Ell gets her schedule months in advance and Ell is very embarrassed.
Okay, so I caught her lying. Big red flag.
By now I’ve put a lot of time into thinking about what this so-called date would look like. One night we actually had a phone call and she requested that I bring my wife and kids. I’m fine with that, but it’s not what I have in mind. It’s getting harder to retain the masculine role but I can’t tell if she’s testing my clarity or if she is testing my spine. Or, something else is happening.
About a week later I send her a voicemail and just let her know that although that was the discussion we had at the start, we don’t need to do it until she has time and feels ready. And I am very specific to call it a date. I say on the voicemail “let’s just call it a date, it’s not a big deal, it’s just a way to get to know each other.”
I haven’t mentioned this yet, but one through-line I’ve maintained since the original café chat two months back is “I like talking to you and would like to get to know you better.” I’m not looking to propose to her. I’m not fantasizing about her. I enjoy talking to her and want to get to know her better. That is the most commitment I can offer right now, and it’s how I feel about it. She has been reciprocating that, I can tell she’s been developing feelings for me, and I can feel that she has been trying to force me into the friend-zone because I’m already married to one wife. She has been engaged in making plans with me, explicitly encouraging me to keep talking to her and texting her. I ask her if she has ever felt pressured by me to share information and she is very chipper and eager to let me know that she likes me and has chosen to invite me into her life. My concern is that her mentor boss Rachel was just inviting my wife and I over because she wants more dance friends, and Ell is specific that it was she herself who prompted Rachel to invite me over all those times.
(continued in comments)
First let me preface this by saying that I do not approach many women seriously for potential courtship as a second wife. I do flirt frequently and regularly and maintain a “non-friend” status with most younger, unmarried women. Sticking my toe in the door is normal for me. In general most women I flirt with are never going to make it anywhere with me, because I own land, have a growing young family, a strong business with great clients, and a very grounded emotional and spiritual life.
What I want to get across is that where I’m at in life, most women whom I might at first consider to be potential second wives pretty quickly disqualify themselves as more of a distraction or detriment to the life God is building for me rather than a benefit or enrichment.
In this case, it was a young woman who I saw on occasion at her job in a bakery café. I’ll call her Ell. She was drawn to talking with me, when she had time to. She offered me free pastries at the end of the night “because we just feed them to the pigs” after the end of the day. We had real chemistry starting way back before we were speaking for real. At first I thought she must be a Mennonite, like many of the coworkers there, but she is nondenominational Protestant.
So we had occasional, limited engagements for quite awhile. I went in there specifically for a quiet place to work, not to engage. I didn’t know her schedule but she was often there and I liked that. This was probably once a month.
There was a period of about four to six months when I didn’t go in there. During this time I was grinding hard, building structures on my land, building structures on a friend’s homestead, and pulling very long nights of client work. It was a gauntlet. I burned off about twenty pounds – coming back into my normal range - eventually shaved off my beard, moved away from glasses and back into contacts. The negative effects of several years of fatigue energy and lack of fitness I had gone through while building up my homestead and putting in too long hours to accommodate this were fading away and I was returning to my normal more focused self with more self-care.
One day about two months ago I returned back into that cafe on a quiet “out-of-office” work day with my laptop. She momentarily looked at me like a new person then realized it was me and remembered my name very quickly. It was a slow day there. Immediately she asked me “so, you have a wife and kids?” That was the moment of realization that I needed to escalate the relationship into something real.
She hung out with me for probably fifteen minutes at my table, and we talked about family and the Bible. She mentioned that she doesn’t know why she believes what she believes. So, I got her number and we made plans to get together and talk about life.
We were texted pretty frequently. I was very keenly aware of the possibility of falling into the friend-zone, so I tried to maintain a flirty personal relationship. It was very difficult to get her on the phone, she said that her phone doesn’t get great reception at her parent’s home. I believe that to be true. We are all very rural and I often have this problem.
Texting sucks. It’s not a way to build a relationship. I wasn’t keen on it. I keep trying to keep the original framing that we are going to hang out together one-on-one.
So she tells me that her brother is coming home for Christmas. She’s taking two weeks off from work for the holidays and her family has a lot of plans. I’m not sure this was an excuse to avoid getting together, I believe it to be true. I hang back and keep distance.
She invites my family out to go Christmas caroling with her. I’m on the fence because we don’t observe Christmas, however my wife and I have been discussing which Christmas songs we actually do like and respect and which we do not. So, this is a chance to explore that. I take my family out.
Ell was cute. She was nervous to meet my wife. She’s attracted to me, she tilts her hips towards me when we talk, she’s opening up her body language. We get invited to her female mentor / work boss’ home for dancing that night. She’s cute as a button, she’s wearing a nice form-fitting attire with a little skinning knife on her hips. I’m silently scrutinizing the little flecks of lint on her maroon sweater. That makes me snobbier than her, which is probably very healthy and makes her more attractive to me.
So I like swing dance and Hebrew circle dance. My wife also does, we’re pretty good at it and polished. When we get there we take the floor and everyone else moves back to the walls and we have the floor to ourselves. We did a good job, we dominated the space. They are all very happy to have us, they love my children, and generally it is a warm inviting space.
We are still in that time period when her family has plans, and she has invited me into her personal life. However, I don’t want to be a part of her personal life. I want to explore if she has high enough value to potentially invite her into my life that I’m building with God’s direction. That being said, my wife and I both realize that she’s vetting me through her close personal friend circle.
The next week we are again invited over for New Years Eve. Again, not necessarily a holiday I want my family to observe because of the pagan roots of it, but New Years Eve in America doesn’t have too much of those attributes. And I already had an invitation to a game night which would have been the alternative, so again I take my family over there. We got there very late. This house is a reasonably good environment for young people to group-date in. When I was their age I lived in a social situation party house which was similar, but theirs is full of board games and Bible studies and mine back then was full of alcohol, drugs, and casual sex with rotating partners. So, who am I to judge.
This was a tricky night for me. Obviously at midnight I kiss my wife every year. It’s our thing. So I’m thinking that I need to keep the door open for putting Ell and me in a place where maybe we are able to escalate. I’m also mildly interested to see if she’s going to kiss her regular dance partner, a tall insecure young man who has eyes for her.
Both nights I have been over there I’ve been careful to interact in a way that I’m trying to make myself a regular dance partner with Ell. My wife is hanging back and joining in the dance about a quarter of the time. Ell is holding my hand when she doesn’t need to, between songs. When we come together occasionally we’re ending up with our fingers intertwined. She leans towards me. She’s not very actively social in front of her friends. She’s quiet and a little withdrawn even from then. I try to flirt with her openly, I am doing what I can to be charming and not focused on her, but talking to the other people there, meeting her male friends, and fill the space with my presence without being overwhelming. In retrospect I feel that I did this very well.
I try to create a scenario with her alone outside by inviting her to look at the new truck I’m buying. She brings two young men. So it’s a nice big truck, too big for my tastes and it’s jacked-up which I don’t need or care for, but it’s a strong good truck which will be good in the backcountry for my wife. It will be safe for my kids and can sit 8-9 people with it’s third row, so it’s something I don’t need now, but I will need it in a few years. And I’m being given a deal I can’t refuse.
So I use this as a segue to mention that I’m going to need it in the future because I plan to have twelve children. I say that directly in front of her male friends. I’m being pretty straightforward for a nonalcoholic party of very young people with a smattering of adults my age. That night I again bring up the “date” but I do it in front of her mentor boss, Rachel. Because Ell has told me that she doesn’t know her schedule in advance and that she has all this time off. Rachel immediately tells me that Ell gets her schedule months in advance and Ell is very embarrassed.
Okay, so I caught her lying. Big red flag.
By now I’ve put a lot of time into thinking about what this so-called date would look like. One night we actually had a phone call and she requested that I bring my wife and kids. I’m fine with that, but it’s not what I have in mind. It’s getting harder to retain the masculine role but I can’t tell if she’s testing my clarity or if she is testing my spine. Or, something else is happening.
About a week later I send her a voicemail and just let her know that although that was the discussion we had at the start, we don’t need to do it until she has time and feels ready. And I am very specific to call it a date. I say on the voicemail “let’s just call it a date, it’s not a big deal, it’s just a way to get to know each other.”
I haven’t mentioned this yet, but one through-line I’ve maintained since the original café chat two months back is “I like talking to you and would like to get to know you better.” I’m not looking to propose to her. I’m not fantasizing about her. I enjoy talking to her and want to get to know her better. That is the most commitment I can offer right now, and it’s how I feel about it. She has been reciprocating that, I can tell she’s been developing feelings for me, and I can feel that she has been trying to force me into the friend-zone because I’m already married to one wife. She has been engaged in making plans with me, explicitly encouraging me to keep talking to her and texting her. I ask her if she has ever felt pressured by me to share information and she is very chipper and eager to let me know that she likes me and has chosen to invite me into her life. My concern is that her mentor boss Rachel was just inviting my wife and I over because she wants more dance friends, and Ell is specific that it was she herself who prompted Rachel to invite me over all those times.
(continued in comments)
