Lightning! Overrated?

I've written many times about the beauty—the desireability—of lightning striking the table when a couple meets for the first time. I experienced this with Mr. Match three-and-a-half years ago. It was an instant sense of attraction, of rightness, of heightened sensitivity. It was a sense of confidence that this was the man of my dreams that I had been waiting eight years to meet. There was an assurance that I could relax because I had found the "it" I wanted.

And yet I was wrong. Or I was right, and the rightness scared the living bejeebies out of him, making him unable to change his old patterns of behavior to settle into the new wonderfulness. He went his own way, and yet every few weeks he would call and want to see me again, until a couple of weeks before I left Tucson. I've never heard from him again.

I kept my eyes open for that lightning strike, and The Traveler and I would discuss our respective dormant love lives and wonder why there were no lightning strikes at any tables we occupied.

Flash forward—or actually move forward at a snail's pace—to several weeks ago when I walked into Panera for a Sunday supper with a man I had "met" on Match. There was a distinct lack of lightning. But in its absence was, even better, a sense of calm, well-being, comfortableness, ease. A sense of all being right in the most peaceable of senses. All this was emanating from a man who turns out to be thoughtful, kind, compassionate, caring, helpful, and possessed of the most incredible blue eyes.

Lightning or all-encompassing calm? I think I'll opt for the calm, thank.you.very.much.