When I started dating Mike, I was taking an acting class. The class was through one of the more prestigious theater companies in the city, the professor was a lovely and talented man, and the class was the most God-awful, boring thing ever.

For those of you not acquainted with the mechanics of a scene study class: You're assigned a scene with a partner, which you work over the week. In class, you present your scene, get some feedback, work a bit with the professor.

This takes maybe 20 minutes. The rest of the three hour class is spent watching the other partners present and work. About an hour in, I reach my breaking point. My attention span is short — that's one of the reasons I teach. Sixteen year olds and I have about the same capacity for focus.

What was funny about this class, though: About a month into the non-relationship Mike and I were having, about the time I was ready to cut and run, we were assigned scenes from a play called Table Settings.

I was given the part of a young woman, recently divorced, completely neurotic, and overly analytical about relationships, who's met someone she might really like and who can't just let herself enjoy it.

It was hard not to suspect conspiracy.

Then again, it made the character analysis part of the class pretty easy.

The monologue that spoke to me the most:

"You know when you meet someone and your heart starts to pound and your stomach turns to mush — Unfortunately, mush never sustains itself. It fades away and the mind goes back to running the show again. I am experiencing a mild case of mush right now.

But I'm so preoccupied with what's going to happen when the mush goes away that I'm not even enjoying the mush when it's here."

This was exactly the advice I'd been getting from all around: Enjoy this. Yes, it may fall apart. Yes, it may end badly. But you have no way of knowing that. And why would you not enjoy the happy part while it's there?

This is the hardest part, I think, about dating again, learning to trust again. Finding out how to enjoy the good parts without anticipating an eventual end.