In the afternoon of my arrival, the first relationship question she asked of me was what I hoped or would like to have happen between us on this trip. I answered that I needed for our relationship to grow during our time together. That meant a deepening of intellectual, emotional, and physical intimacy. She needed for me to be more open with her. She felt that I had been "keeping" things from her, not telling her everything about me. She said she felt she knew a great deal about me in terms of compatability but did not know very much about "me" as a person. A conversation about what exactly she meant lead to the discovery that we had differing thoughts about privacy. I had, in fact, not told her anything about the private side of me because it just never came up in any conversation. She wanted to know the private me, what I do and think when I am alone. She gave examples of whether I sang in the shower, what I feel when I look at myself naked, what I do spontaneously, etc. That set the tone of our time together. I was going to let her see my private side.
The difficulty is that there is really no logical starting place or ending place for that type of conversation. So we basically just hung out together for a week talking about whatever topics came up between us. I had not finished my Christmas shoppping and we shopped together for a gift for my parents. She was able to observe how I selected gifts for people. She had learned chess as a child but had not played it as an adult. I also enjoy chess. So we bought a chess set and played chess together. I had warned her that how I strategized chess play would reveal a great deal of my private side and she might not like some of what she saw.
And she didn't. We eventually played several games over a few days, but after the very first one she said that she could see that I liked to dominate and manipulate things. She asked if I did that in relationships too. I replied no, only in chess. During our last game she suddenly said thatI had lied to her. She remembered me telling her that I was not very competitive. She felt that my chess play revealed an extremely competitive aspect of my personality. Well, yes and no. I compete against myself, I explained. I enjoy improving my chess ability. I want to play better in each game. Winning a game in which I made several errors is not enjoyable. Losing a game in which I played to the best of my ability is enjoyable despite not winning. She liked that explanation.
I met some of her friends, included a cousin she is close to. All of them regaled me with accolades about her. That she is a wonderful person, a warm person, a considerate person, etc. The cousin almost threatened me to treat my namorada very well and not break her heart. She lectured me about how my namorada deserves to be happy. This cousin told me things that showed my namorada to be more modest that I had believed. I was let in on some family drama and told how my namorada has been dealing with it with great dignity. This led to a tense situation for me as my namorada later asked me to share my private thoughts about her family with her.
