A Bit Discouraged Tonight

I'm sitting here with my roommate, stalking some of my old friends from Hawaii on Facebook. I had a great reunion with a few of them this last weekend and it had me jonesing for a little aloha in my life.

There was a cute guy I used to go to school with. He was really funny and pretty good-looking. I always had kind of a friend-crush on him; I wanted to get to know him better and become better friends with him, which likely would have resulted in me getting a huge crush on the guy, as it usually happens.  In any case, he popped into my head tonight as I was reminiscing, mostly because he came along with me and my friends on our most quintessential Hawaiian vacation adventure.

I looked him up on Facebook and was surprised to see a picture of him and another pretty good-looking guy on the very front page. There was a lot of body language in the picture to suggest that they might be a bit more than friends. I started stalking my old crush a little bit, trying to find out if life had changed for him since he left Hawaii. I secretly hoped it had and secretly hoped it hadn't.

(Every time I find out one of my Mormon friends is going to live the lifestyle, I get a little bummed out. I need a pacesetter, someone who can forge a path through it and live an abundantly awesome life in spite of choosing religious convictions over emotional ones. I need someone to set that example for me, because I'm not sure I can do it myself.)

Back to my friend, I'm still not sure if he's gay or not. I dunno, I've had straight friends who could be friendly-physical with their other straight friends without any of that homoerotic connotation; he could just be another one of those.  But still, it's got me wondering if he's gay and decided that the Church just wasn't worth it.

If that's the case, then I'm pretty disappointed. Not disappointed in him at all, because I'm kind of a moral relativist and I'd respect his agency, but in the situation. Here he is, a BYU graduate, a returned missionary, the squeakiest-clean guy I'd met in a long time, serving in a billion positions in the church and loving every second of it, and then deciding that it wasn't worth it.

Quite frankly, it's got me thinking, what chance do I have at making it if faithful people like him can't? I mean, even if I made it out on a mission, how long would I last after that? Five years?

I dunno, I guess that kind of thinking is what gets people discouraged and willing to give up.  Still, there it is.

(Of course, there's the very real possibility that he's straight and all of this is just a bunch of me basing my emotions on an erroneous conclusion. Wouldn't be the first time.)