Guarding Your Heart

I had never heard of the concept of "guarding your heart" until I moved back to NorCal a couple of years ago.  I have long been of the opinion that you can't consciously choose who it is that you are attracted to, you can only choose how you are going to act in response to those feelings.  The idea of deliberately not feeling so strongly about a girl seems impossible, since if it was, "guarding my heart" wouldn't be my only motivation to do so.  Life would just be a lot easier.

I have experienced it operating in reverse recently, which was an interesting process to consciously observe.  There was a girl who kept indirectly expressing interest in me, over a long period of time.  I didn't mind hanging out with her, but didn't feel strongly about the issue, probably due in part to the fact that I have had a very singular focus in that regard over the last few years.  Once I "got past" that issue, I tried to take the idea a bit more seriously.  With a number of other doors shutting around me, maybe that was the direction God wanted me to go.  And if it was, would I be okay with that?  The girl in question was getting more aggressive in our interactions, without ever talking about it directly, so the situation needed to be addressed one way or another, especially once her friends started getting in on the action.

I thought and prayed about it for about a week before I concluded that I was in favor of pursuing that possibility.  I had to be able to imagine what it would be like to succeed, before I could summon up the courage to take the first step in that direction.  Taking the initiative to "break that plane" as I call it, to go beyond talking about shallow small talk subjects is always challenging, and this was no exception, even though I wasn't nearly as emotionally caught up in the idea as I usually am by the time I take some deliberate action.

Both of my previous significant relationships were developed at the girl's initiative as opposed to my own.  I have a fairly perfect record of nothing positive ever coming from directly pursuing a girl, and not for lack of trying.  If I take any initiative to move things forward, the response is always negative, even if the girl does the exact same thing a short time later.  I assume there is some spiritual reason for this since the pattern is far too strong to be random.  I can see how it handicaps my leadership role in a potential relationship, by at the very least causing me to hesitate to take action.

Quite the unexpectedly, the response was a negative one, although the girl acknowledged her role getting to that point, she "hadn't really thought about" the outcome.  She didn't really have a reason for her response, but apologized for the position she had put me in.  So the pattern remains unbroken, and I look back to see that I had done the exact opposite of guarding one's heart.  But if it is possible to deliberately set out to care about someone more, then it is probably possible to deliberately care about them less.  But is that really the best way to approach relationships?