My morning routine is the only thing that maintains consistent in my life. I set my alarm for 7:00AM, snooze it once, twice, usually three times (if I’m being honest), and end up sliding out of my morning Timehop/Instagram/Facebook slum at around 8:00AM. I get ready, reach for my phone, order my morning coffee from the Starbucks down the road, and pick it up on my way to work- because I hate waiting in line.

I get to work, park my car, and take the elevator- because I “don’t have time” for the stairs. At lunch, I’ll pre-order something for pickup or, when I’m feeling extra feisty, I’ll pay EXTRA so someone else has to bring it TO ME- because I hate waiting. I pay for Amazon prime because two days is too long to wait for an item that I didn’t need in the first place. Heck, I don’t even have to wait around for a guy to notice me anymore because I can hop on an app and have my pick of anyone in a 25 mile radius who happens to think my pictures make me out to be a cool person. It’s easy for me because I live in a world that enables me to be impatient.

So imagine my surprise when I met someone who made me want to be patient. It’s always a boy, isn’t it? They waltz into your fast-paced life and, without even having to say it, force you to pump the breaks on the “instant gratification train” that you’ve been riding your whole life. I met him accidentally. It’s all a very long, complicated, semi-embarrassing story but at the end of it all, he has become a very significant part of my life. We understand each other on an entirely different level than anyone around us could ever understand. We could honestly have an entire conversation just by staring at each other. And while there’s an incredibly long list of things that I’ve learned since meeting him, patience is the hardest lesson of them all.

When I met him, he was fresh out of a relationship, dealing with a lot of personal crisis, and just all-around not ready to pick up what I was putting down. He was honest about everything in the very beginning so I knew what I was signing up for when I said “I’m gonna be here for you no matter what.” But then days turned into weeks, into months, into miles, and eventually my pride started to kick into overdrive. I would find myself saying “It’s not fair that I’m stuck here waiting for something that might not even happen.” As if I didn’t have the choice to walk away even if I wanted to. We began to fight a lot and when I tried to remember what we were fighting about, I honestly couldn’t. At the end of the day, I realized I was fighting with him because I was fighting with myself. I was trying to gratify the desire I had in myself to be with this guy who really just needed me to be around. He just needed someone to listen, to laugh with, and to give him advice and I was more worried about whether or not he wanted to date me. I was growing impatient because I was focused on the end result that I wanted. And because I was so focused on the end result, I wasn’t enjoying all of the in-between as much as I needed to be.

At the end of the day, I have no idea where my relationship with this guy will end up. Maybe we’ll be friends forever, maybe we’ll be more- who knows? But in the interim, I want to focus on being more patient. I want to enjoy all of the great things that come along with us just being us. You will miss out on so much happiness in life if you treat every situation like an elevator— sometimes you’ve got to take the stairs to really enjoy the climb.