Ryan

It is very dangerous to end a post with "I'll write within the week," yet I committed that very error the last time I wrote, which was...three months ago. Ha ha! My apologies for not delivering as I promised. Life has been very full, but that is all the more reason to document the wonderful things that have been happening. Even though so many things have characterized my past months, including starting a new job as a research program coordinator, traveling around the Northeast for medical school interviews, and deepening my relationships with my family and my friend Tim, I am going to dedicate this post to a special person in my life, Ryan Shields. I will write about the rest in a subsequent post which, let's be honest, probably won't get written within the next week.

I suppose another apology is in order at the start of this blog post, and this one is meant much more seriously than the one I half-jokingly wrote about waiting almost three months to publish on this blog again.

My candid apology:

This summer, as I tutored a small group of students who had previously been my classmates but who were taking organic chemistry during the summer, I got in a conversation with one of them named Eden (with whom I was particularly close) over a coffee after our tutoring session. As she and I talked, I complained to her about my romantic life. I told her that I finally had the time for a relationship now that the post-baccalaureate program had ended and that emotionally I felt ready for a relationship since it had been years since I broke up with Troy and I felt like my healing and growth from my relationship with him had finished. She asked me what my barriers to finding a relationship were, and I told her that it was just hard to meet guys who date guys. She said, "you should get an online dating profile. You would meet tons of guys that way!" I responded to her, "no, online dating isn't for me. I want to meet someone organically, in-person." Eden asked what my hesitation with meeting someone online was, and I confessed to her that, because of the negative things that I was taught about what it means to be gay, I am always afraid that people will think I am just embodying the stereotype of being a promiscuous gay man, especially if I date online since there are online websites and iPhone apps dedicated to sexual hook-ups and casual relationships that do not represent what I am looking for. I worried about what people would think of me if I was using any online platform, even ones dedicated to quality relationships. Eden looked in my eyes with compassion and just said, "the people who are your true friends aren't going to judge you or think you're promiscuous if you use an online platform to date, and if anyone does, they probably don't belong in your life, anyway." She asked for my phone, and she installed an app called Coffee Meets Bagel: Quality Dating Made Easy. She told me that it works through your Facebook network to introduce you to friends of friends so that you have something in common with the people that it matches you with. Eden uploaded one photo of me for my profile, and that was it.

The app sends you the profile of one person a day, and you and the person whose profile you were sent both have 24 hours to decide if you want to chat or not. The first two days that I got sent another guy's profile, I felt uncomfortable choosing a "yes" or "no" and so simply didn't choose and let the 24 hours elapse without a decision. On the third day, though, I got sent the profile of an adorable man--he had a big, warm smile on his bearded face, was a medical student at Johns Hopkins, and listed some interests that were very similar to mine, including magical realism in literature and foreign cultures and travel. So I said "yes" and found out that he had said "yes," too. We arranged to meet up for a casual dinner date later that week that I will tell you about shortly.

My apology goes out to you if I told you anything different about my genesis with Ryan. I think I told a few of you that we met through a mutual friend, which is only half true. My friend Eden was the one who made my profile on this dating app for me and the one who convinced me that the only person stopping me from finding the relationship that I wanted was me, so I do attribute meeting Ryan to her. But I am sorry that I lied. I am still somewhat uncomfortable about having met someone using an iPhone app, but given that Ryan is wonderful and that I am finally in a relationship like I desired to be, I think I should just shed the embarrassment and embrace it. (As it turns out, Ryan and I actually met in person, organically, months before we found each other on this app, but I'll save that story for later!) I think it's a bad idea to start a relationship out with lies, and my relationship with Ryan is a wonderful, mature, positively-challenging part of my life right now. I want both it and my relationships with all of you to be unencumbered by my dishonesty, and that is why I am setting the record straight here and apologizing to you all for failing to do so initially. I got insecure and made a bad decision as a result. I'm sorry.

At our first meeting in person (well, what we thought was our first meeting in person), Ryan and I discovered a host of common interests. We both loved other cultures, travel, and foreign languages. We both were interested in OBGYN, with Ryan's interest obviously more mature as a fourth-year medical student than my premedical interest, but very similar nonetheless. I think we both felt very excited about our connection that evening--we talked for a few fast hours, shared a pizza, parted with a hug, and decided that we wanted to get lunch the next day during our hour lunch breaks at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where we both work. The next day, Ryan drove us to an Italian restaurant called DiPasquales where we split a couple of panini and got cannolli for dessert that we shared very briefly in Baltimore's beautiful Patterson Park after our quick lunch in the restaurant. We drove back to work after that since we still had to finish our Friday afternoon labor.

Baltimore's Patterson Park, where Ryan and I had our first brief kiss.

I hadn't begun to work full-time yet, so that afternoon I worked on finishing a secondary applications to medical school out on a sunny bench of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine campus. I got a text from Ryan saying that he got out of work early and that he wanted to have an afternoon adventure with me. He came down to where I was working outside in the sun, and he said "this weather is too perfect to waste. Let's do something spontaneous. Let's go hiking!" Ryan and I drove about 20 minutes to Leakin Park, where we hiked around some beautiful landscapes. One trail we took ended up at an elegant mansion, and we lay down on the grassy hill beside it, talked, played with a dog that loved Ryan and kept licking his face, and had a gorgeous afternoon together. (We found out later that a truly disturbing number of bodies that have been murdered in Baltimore show up in Leakin Park because of how enormous and forest-like it is while still being not too far away from the city. Yikes! Not so romantic, but our time there certainly was.)

I think we both felt pretty serious about the relationship from the beginning, which has made it simple to grow into our still very new relationship. After that third date in Leakin Park on only the second day we knew each other, the rest of the dates and their chronology are not quite as clear in my mind since their frequency and number only increased as we got to know each other better. One evening, after treating Ryan to a really delicious meal, he and I walked around the gorgeous houses in the neighborhood of the restaurant where we had just eaten. One building was particularly incredible, and it had a courtyard in the middle that was a beautiful French garden, illuminated on that summer night with small underwater lights in the pool and fountains it contains. Ryan and I sat on a bench there and talked, and I will never forget the feeling of bliss at being there with him. We laughed about the cupcake for dessert that we had boxed up and placed near the shallow pool in this garden. We talked about how neat things tended to happen when we hung out. We were in total heaven. Once we left our romantic spot on that bench and walked back to Ryan's car, we bumped into an older man walking two dogs. As it turned out, this man lived in one of these condos surrounding the French garden with his male partner! Ryan and I spoke with him for awhile on the street. Once we got in the car, Ryan said, "wait, we should get his number and keep him as a contact! This was such a fortuitous run-in." We went searching for Bill, the older man we had just met, but we were not able to find him again. A couple of months later, wanting to give Ryan a good surprise and show him that I'm good at follow-through, I did my best detective work to find Bill and set up a nice evening of hors d'oeuvres and conversation with Bill, his partner, Ryan, and me. Ryan loved the surprise, and it was fun to re-visit the same spot where we had been that magical night months before.

The Roland Park Condominiums garden

The summer was full of many wonderful things. Ryan rents his apartment from landlords who also own a nice home in a town right on the ocean called Rehobeth Beach, so Ryan and I went up to that beach house on multiple occasions this summer with other couples friends of his. We went up with Henry and Sonya first, two of Ryan's dearest friends (Ryan was Henry's best man at Henry's and Sonya's wedding), and we had a wonderful time reading in the sand, swimming in the pool, and making delicious dishes together and playing card games at night. We later went up with another couple, Desmond and Tyler, which I think was my first gay double date. Tyler is in Ryan's medical school class at Hopkins, and Dez is an MD/PhD student at a medical school in Washington, DC. We had a wonderful time. Dez and I took a long run together (Dez is an incredible runner who qualifies repeatedly for and competes in the Boston Marathon) while Ryan and Tyler made us dinner, for example. All four of us ate at Chick Fil A after learning that the company had reversed their homophobic statements and were now trying to be gay-friendly. Call us crazy, but we all felt like we were given exceptional service from the staff there, one of whom came by to make sure our food was good and to offer us different dipping sauces for our fries. We thought was a nice thing to do for we four men given that some of us (AKA moi) expressed hesitation at eating at a restaurant chain formerly infamous for being anti-gay. Ha ha! We had a great time.

We made some tasty, nutritious meals this summer at the beach house

This is Ryan's "front yard." Yup.

In Baltimore itself, Ryan lives directly on the water. His house is stunningly gorgeous. This summer, we would take walks along the harbor. One night, we bought delicious flavors of gelato (mango and chili chocolate, for example) and then sat down on a dock in the harbor and just talked. I learned in that talk that Ryan also loves films by Hayao Miyazaki (like Totoro and Princess Mononoke) and that his mother is Japanese, so he too was raised in a family with a lot of Japanese influence. Ryan actually speaks a fair bit of Japanese and has, on occasion, texted me in Japanese, making me wish I hadn't dropped that class my freshman year at BYU! Ryan has also lived in Japan before and was raised eating really authentic Japanese food from his mother. Maybe I can have Ryan teach me Japanese one day. He has certainly taught me how to make really delicious ramen noodles, and for his birthday I made him his favorite dish (in Weatherford tradition) of udon noodles with edamame for an appetizer and mochi for dessert. Yum!

Ryan, lord of the table!

Ryan and I have had a lot of fun cooking together in both of our kitchens (though admittedly, his is a lot prettier and has more space). We've tried some great recipes. Here we are enjoying a couple of dishes from his Jerusalem cookbook. Ryan's family is Jewish, and it has been so fascinating to learn more about Judaism and Jewish culture. Ryan has taught me a lot about everything from Rosh Hashana, which I celebrated this year (I'll pique your interest by telling you I wore a yarmulke and ate apples and honey!), to how to recognize a Jewish last name and much more. Comparing our upbringings has been pretty fascinating, since Ryan only has one sibling and was raised in an all-Jewish community in Michigan, whereas Judaism to me was something that we studied in school but about which I knew very little experientially. We constantly marvel at the very different experiences the two of us had growing up in America.

"Thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening me!"

We've enjoyed other fun moments together, as well. Ryan went to great lengths to procure me a good Halloween costume as I traveled back to Baltimore on a BoltBus from New York City late on Halloween night after a medical school interview up there. I ended up going as Freddie Mercury from Queen, and Ryan was Marty McFly from Back to the Future. We had a blast being out with some of our friends on the crowded, cold streets of Baltimore.


One night, as I was describing a nurse that I had worked with that day, Ryan said that he thought he knew her. I said, "no, you probably don't, since she really never leaves the one back room of the Fetal Assessment Center." Ryan than said, "You know, I really think I know her, and I think I met her the same day I met Dr. Henderson. I was doing my maternal-fetal medicine rotation on obstetric ultrasound clinic that day. I still remember that I went up to Dr. Henderson because another doctor recommended that I ask her my question, and I was frustrated because she was spending all of her time with a pre-medical student instead of answering my question." In my head I thought, "that's weird that Ryan did a maternal-fetal medicine elective rotation, and the only pre-medical student that Dr. Henderson worked with last year was me." We both paused and then gave each other the strangest of all looks. "Oh my gosh, Ryan, I think we've met before." His face said the exact same thing. "No way! Oh my goodness, you were the pre-med! I can remember you now! I actually remember checking you out and wondering if you were gay," Ryan said. It was the most bizarre thing ever. I could still remember meeting Ryan then, too. I even remembered his shoes, which he still wears. Admittedly, I totally checked him out at that time, too--he was a well-dressed, stethosope-wearing, super handsome man who was telling me about his interest in women's healthcare. How could I not be attracted to him? To make sure that we were both remembering each other correctly from months before, we checked our schedules from the past December, and sure enough, we were both in the obstetric ultrasound clinic on December 5, 2013. So Ryan and I actually met, in person, a year ago. It just took a nudge from my friend and modern technology for us to find each other. Isn't that an amazing story? It just goes to show that life is full of surprises. When I saw that attractive man that day, who would have ever guessed I would be given the true privilege of calling him my boyfriend months later? It was one of life's best surprises. 

There is so much that I could say about Ryan and the wonderful times that we have had together. I will end by just highlighting a few characteristics of his that I really appreciate, and I will obviously integrate stories about him in future blog posts as long as we continue to be in each other's lives. For one, he is my equal and isn't afraid to tell me when I've hurt him or behaved badly, which is new for me in a relationship. Though this means that we have had more conflict in our relationship than I have in the past, I actually really love it because it gives us a chance to communicate, to change, and to understand each other better. Ryan isn't afraid to tell me when I've hurt him, and so I'm not afraid to tell him, either, and we always communicate really well during these conversations and find ways to make improvements. It's wonderful. Ryan is very smart and very driven, and I find that very attractive. He's just a few classes shy of receiving his MD degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and I'm sure he'll go on to do wonderful things in his clinical practice and with his research. Here is a photo of him presenting a poster in Chicago on research that he conducted in Malaysia. He's a smarty pants (and super handsome in his glasses!):

He is incredibly supportive of me. Before each medical school interview I have, he sends me a creative text message saying "Good luck, Rob!" Many of these are superimposed on a photo of us together, and they always warm my heart and give me courage for my interviews. Here is an example:

He is just a sensitive, funny, playful, smart, handsome man. I'm super grateful I met him. I've already learned a lot about myself and relationships from him, and we've only been together since this past July. I think we are both looking forward to deepening our relationship!

I love this photo because of the nice traits of Ryan's that it captures--his love of animals, his tenderness, and his attractiveness!