I Set the Pace

I didn’t have much experience with relationships early on. I didn’t know how to talk to girls, let alone date them. So when Sandy showed up and wasn’t turned off by that, it stood out. She told me she liked going out with me because I wasn’t “playing the game.” I didn’t know what she meant by that. I remember thinking, what’s wrong with her, in a good way.

Over time, she shared more about her past. Not all at once, but enough that it stayed with me. She talked about relationships that didn’t go well, about being mistreated, about things she had gone through when she was younger. She also told me what she thought her future might look like. She described it pretty plainly: living at home, relying on social systems, with two or three kids. Not much structure beyond that. Hearing it at that age left an impression. I didn’t have a big emotional reaction I could name at the time, but I could picture it. It stayed with me. I remember thinking I didn’t want that to be her future.

Back then I was still living with my dad. My room was always a mess, clothes on the floor, barely any space to walk. It stayed that way. There wasn’t much urgency to clean it. When she started coming over, she saw it and would clean it. It happened more than once. She spent time there, and I didn’t question it. I remember thinking, what else am I supposed to think about that.

At some point, things started to move forward. We had been together for years, and we decided to get an apartment together. It wasn’t casual. It felt like we were trying to see if this would actually work. The space was different. It felt new. It didn’t look like my old room. There was a sense that we were building something together.

By then, we had been together for five years. That was the number she used. It wasn’t framed as an argument, just a question: it’s been five years, where is this going? She wasn’t going to keep going without an answer.

Things started to settle into a rhythm. I took on what I thought I needed to take on: stability, responsibility, keeping things moving. I didn’t spend much time thinking about how I felt. It just wasn’t something I engaged with. At some point, during our engagement or early in our marriage, I said it out loud. “I wasn’t a touchy-feely person.” It wasn’t a big moment, just something stated plainly. It fit where things were at the time, and it held. That became normal.

I became a father at 27. Before that, I had said things about the kind of dad I was going to be, that I was going to be the best dad, that I was going to be someone they could talk to, and that we were going to be close. My cousins still remember those conversations. Early on, I was very controlling. They would ask if they could take the girls for the weekend, and I would say no. The only people I trusted with them were our mothers. That was it. I thought I knew how it should be done. I expected to raise them a certain way, without much room for anything outside of that. It didn’t play out the way I thought it would.

There’s a saying I grew up hearing: “lo que no se aprende, se hereda.” What isn’t learned gets passed down. I think about my room back then, clothes everywhere, no space to walk, and then I look at my daughters’ rooms now. Same pattern. Sometimes worse. I find myself frustrated when I see it, but there’s something else there too. I’ve seen this before.

We’ve had our dog, Gir, since he was a puppy. He’s 10 now. For a long time, I didn’t take care of him. I wouldn’t take him out or clean up after him. It wasn’t random. I had tied it to something I was trying to teach my girls about responsibility. It didn’t land the way I thought it would, but I kept going with it anyway. It went on longer than it should have.

I stopped and asked myself why I was taking it out on the dog. There wasn’t a good answer. The lesson had already failed, and Gir had nothing to do with it.

Something else crossed my mind. He had been there the whole time. As he got older, it felt like he might be the only one who would just be there, without anything attached to it. I stopped seeing him as part of a failed lesson and started seeing him for what he was: a dog that had been there the entire time. The way I acted changed without needing to force it.

More recently, I’ve started to notice other things. I feel more present than I used to. I find myself wanting a different kind of connection. My wife and I still move inside the rhythm we built over years, less affection, more function. It works, because it’s what we learned to do, but I can see it now in a way I couldn’t before.

At some point, without realizing it, I set the pace.