If I stipulate to your premise that men and women behave differently in general in this area (which I don’t buy), those stereotypes will inevitably fall apart at the individual.
Make us care about this specific man and this specific woman and what their individual personalities and motivations are. Forget about any stereotypes about men and women you believe exits.
The old saying, a man can easily have another child, a woman can easily find a new husband, wives/kids are difficult, is more true than most people like to admit.
Rushgeekgirl That sucks balls. Where was he deported to?
RivkaChaya, that is a beautiful story.
If you look more closely (hint: check the standard deviations) you’ll find there is really no significant difference.
When I was a freshman in college, in 1987, I fell madly in love with this boy and he with me. Because we were young and stupid – both still teenagers-- it didn’t work out. We remained friends, but each kept our distance (because it was just too goddamned painful to see each other on a regular basis – we were simply friendly if we happened to bump into each other). After college, I moved 1,000 miles away, but we’ve kept in touch through the years, especially once email and social media were invented. He was the first person I tracked down via the internet and I was probably one of his first internet quests as well.
This past summer, I happened to be in the city he lives in and he noticed this on Facebook – he saw my posts from my visit to our alma mater. He PM’d me to see if I wanted to meet up and, lo and behold, I happened to have an afternoon free. So I met him for brunch. Because I thought it would be no big deal and we were both obviously completely over one another.
Which turned into one of the nicest afternoons I have had in a long time. After lunch, we walked to a nearby park and did 30 years of catching up. It was clear to me, about fifteen minutes in, that we still love each other. I could feel it coming off him. We still raise the same energy we raised 30 years ago, despite both being involved in various different relationships, having “moved on” since then.
We hugged and parted ways. I went to the airport to go home. While I was standing in line for security, he PM’d me again to thank me for the afternoon and made a point of telling me that he loves me very, very much (two verys). Knowing that he was about to get married to wife #2 in a few months, and having just realized that afternoon how much I still love him, I burst into ugly snotty tears right there in line for security. I sniffled and sobbed my way through being wanded and patted down.
Two things I learned:
Despite moving on and thinking we were over it, we’ve never not loved one another. Now the circumstances will never permit a second chance at that relationship and I’m not sure that we’d both be amenable even if they were conducive, i.e., we are both single and live in the same city. And,
If you are ugly crying and loudly sobbing as you walk through an airport, nobody will bat an eye, make eye contact, or ask if you are okay. It’s like having total privacy only not having any at all. Weird. That reminded me of Clan of the Cave Bears where Ayla explains that you never, *ever *look into another family’s hearth.
Also: When I get to the reunion bits in the third season of Outlander, I am going to be a MESS. 
We all are, honey. 
Wonderful story, Dogzilla. Thanks. 
Not if you’ve been living through it, though. But feel free to use it, or parts of it, and if you want some details or whatever, PM me.
I shall now go drink heavily and Facebook stalk my ex, ogling his recent wedding pictures. 
Right - I mean…‘wonderful’ as in, very moving/poignant…
Wow. :eek: good stuff.
Except the security people who may suspect you’re suicidal and pull you aside for a search and wanding.
This is probably semantics. I’ve always thought of “in love” as the initial rush. From there it deepens into “love”, which isn’t as intense, but is longer lasting. If you, as a writer, have convinced me that the relationship has gone beyond the first rush, I’m willing to believe it will last any amount of time.
Awesome story, Dogzilla. I’ve gone through something similar, myself:
My serious college girlfriend and I dated for nearly two years. She broke it off with me, when she could tell that I was starting to think about marriage (at that point, I was 22, and she was 20). Her stated reason, at that time, was that she was a pre-med major, and felt that, in order to achieve that dream of hers, she would need to completely focus herself on her studies, for the next 6 to 8 years of her life (and, thus, would not be able to put the energy into a marriage).
I was heartbroken (and, truly, so was she, since we were very deeply in love), but I understood her reasoning. Thus, it was an amicable break-up, and we remained friends. That was October of '87; I’d see her fairly regularly for the next year and a half (I was finishing my Master’s degree), but once I moved from Madison to Chicago, we didn’t see each other again (though we would talk from time to time, on the phone, or in letters).
Over the years, she realized that she was bisexual, and that she preferred women to men. She hadn’t really realized this during the time that we dated, but it did make me wonder, if we had wound up together, if it would have lasted. I wound up marrying someone else (very happily so) in '92, but when I would think about my college girlfriend, there was always a little wistfulness about what might have been.
Anyway, time passed. For a variety of personal reasons, she did not wind up going to medical school, though she did eventually get her doctorate. Once Facebook became a thing, we were able to be in touch more regularly. She’d dated a few women over the years, and had finally found one with whom she really felt a connection. When same-sex marriage was legalized a couple of years ago, she and her girlfriend were finally able to wed…and they invited us to the wedding, which was a year ago.
As it turned out, my wife wasn’t able to attend, so I went “stag”. It was the first time that I’d actually been in the same room with her since 1989. I wound up sitting at the ceremony with her family (who had always adored me, and whom I hadn’t seen in 28 years). As the reception wound down, she and I were able to sit and talk for a quarter-hour or so…and that’s the part that Dogzilla’s story brought to my mind. She and I had never stopped loving each other.
I was thrilled to see her that happy with her new wife, just as she was thrilled to know that I was happy in my own life. We both knew that we would never (and could never) be together again, and, yet…we both also realized that, if circumstances had been different, and we could somehow be together, the love was still there.
No, I’m reminded of As Time Goes By.
In 1966 my family moved about 300 miles. My older brother, then in junior high, had a very good female friend - not quite a girlfriend, but not just a friend – and they lost touch. He married and divorced, etc.
In 2001, he saw an obituary for her mother in the alumni magazine, with contact info for her surviving children. He sent her a condolence email, she responded, and they have been married for 13 years now. She claims never to have loved anyone else.
What is striking is how happy he is since then - he never really was before.
I wonder if anyone has ever had an attempted reunion as weird and as inexplicable as mine…[warning long post, this is just the bare bones treatment too…also noticed that a mod moved it here to CS, where it might be quasi off-topic now, oh well…]
Eileen and I met when we were young teens in the late 70’s at the condo building our parents had units at. When I first laid eyes on her, talking to my sister at the poolside, my instant thought was, “I know that girl.” That presaged the quality of interaction that we shared, doing things without verbalizing it first, liking the same kind of music, making up our own games, etc. The sheer spontaneity of it all. Unlike with other girls I felt at total peace with her.
But circumstances and psychology worked against us. Her immigrant parents disliked me, had an arranged marriage ready to go when she reached her early 20’s, and we were two deeply insecure kids who had no idea what we were really doing. So our feelings remained unstated. I myself was a pretty lost soul, self-esteem in the sewer, no direction to my life at all. But when I was with her all of my demons retreated.
When her 16th birthday approached, we became even closer, she once put her arm around me (thanks mainly to her best friend having the hots for me) and told me how much she trusted me, then we shared the perfect kiss on the beach one night.
But the rest of my life and psyche were falling apart at this point (I had just dropped out of college for the 2nd time in a year), and then her dad laid down the law on my ass, implicitly threatening me if I were to take her virginity or such.
At that point it all fell apart, the magic simply vanished, and she underwent a strange change in personality as well. We did a few casual things here and there, then she moved out of town for her upperclass degree, and we lost touch.
Meanwhile all of this happened to me (late '91), and I became a changed man. Idly started wondering about reconnecting, but found out from my sister that she had gotten married!
So I slowly let go, assumed I was over her by the mid 90’s, went about my life, met one wonderful woman-who couldn’t handle my energy or something, we broke up after a month-long romance.
My last meeting with Eileen was…weird. [c. 1998] I was on an elevator at the condo, and this youngish couple got on, at her floor. The weird thing is that I didn’t even recognize her at first, less because of any weight she might have put on, but more because her…aura…seemed utterly different.
Then it got even weirder-when she recognized my voice, she instantly got extremely nervous, and started doing this bizarre shuffling her feet thing right there on the elevator. We got out and went our separate ways. I did wonder what the aftermath of that would have been vis-a-vis her husband…
Long story short I got a second wind in 2010, lost a ton of weight, started wondering about her again, found out that she had gotten divorced, and while idly Googling her one night discovered a song that she had almost certainly written about me, made while still married (he even played on it). She had come across me crying in bed one day back in the early 80’s (while we were still close), and right from the first stanza that was all there in pretty exacting detail as she talked about waking up a friend who was crying in bed in the morning, asking him to yes come out and “play”. 5 minutes later that day we were splashing about in the pool, and I had completely forgotten what it was exactly that I was crying about…
She also utterly nailed the lost person that I had been, and on top of all of that she had given me several pieces of advice, all of which I had (unwittingly) followed in the interim, to the letter. She said she couldn’t change me, couldn’t heal me, but I got healed, anyway. She also used the “L” word…
So I decided to try to reconnect. I mean, who wouldn’t under such circumstances?
I noticed a concert that she would be giving in a month, and decided to go to it, to see what might happen, see if there was anything left there…she had told me years earlier that her eyesight was fated to decline thanks to a congenital condition, so I also prepared myself for that as well…
Walked in and around the corner, and there she was. I judged that she had, based on a pic from 2 years earlier, lost even more weight than I had. She didn’t recognize my voice, which I found odd (I’ve been told my voice is very distinctive). But I just note that I felt no butterflies or such of any sort on my end, either.
She confirmed that most of her eyesight was now gone.
After an impromptu pizza dinner after the concert, we exchanged emails and phone numbers, and promised to keep in touch. One thing happened during the dinner which I did get a WTF feeling about-our pizza cheese got tangled, which caused her to emit this strangely hollow laugh. In the past something like that would have instantly strengthened our bond, but in this instance it just kind of pushed me away in a way… Another odd thing was that she never cracked a single joke the entire time, this from a girl who would frequently makes humorous quips about this or that (usually in a dry manner, occ. w/ a silly bent).
2 weeks later (got one short and undetailed email 2 days after the concert, then nothing), I could hold my tongue no more, esp. after snapping up her 2 CD’s on sale that day and noting at least 2 more likely candidates*, and tried to thank her for the song via email. Tried to otherwise keep things low key and open-ended, no undying declarations, simply pointed out that we had a new opportunity to share like we had years earlier. [A few songs seemed to show a strong bond with nature and wildlife, eh, just like me…]
[*In one, she simply copied (was “inspired” by/crafted a “homage”) of a hit song by my favorite band back then, one which also perfectly captured the “zone” we were in back then. In the other, she described the exploits of an artist with my middle name, this after asking me about my art that day and even admitting that she had a painting of mine underneath her bed. Oddly, there was arguably nothing written about her then-husband on the one they recorded together…]
She remained silent for 6 months. I tried 2 more emails during that time, short and matter of fact, just wishing to open up an authentic dialogue. In the meantime just looking for some perspective I looked up her best friend from back then. To my utter surprise she confirmed that the song was about me, started life as a poem she penned in the early 80’s and had shared with said friend. The friend got her album years later and simply noted the presence of the poem’s lyrics in said song (it was the title cut too).
When she finally decided to reply, I got something that I never expected from her in a million years, an email that felt very and deeply wrong. In it she not only claimed that the song wasn’t about me (said her drummer of all people contributed to it, if you can believe that…), she intimated that we had shared nothing of consequence years ago, strongly implied that I had a problem if I still had a thing for her after all of these years, and called me a stalker along with several other bizarre statements and veiled accusations, all the while gussying it up in this fluffy insincere prose, even going so far as to tell me that she just “hated” the thought that she might be hurting anyone. In the end, after “swearing” that she was being truthful with me like 3 different times, she offered me a sort of friendship after all of that, if you can believe it. If anyone knows what gaslighting and such is, that is what it felt like, someone trying to deliberately fuck with my head and call into question all of my recollections from years ago, for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
My life had become such a living dream by this point, however, that said slings and arrows just wafted through and out of me like it was nothing. At that point I knew that whatever it was that we had had years ago, it was now completely and utterly dead. I also knew that I couldn’t just passively cowtow to her lies and manipulations or I would be just as guilty. So I wrote back, with her old friend’s confirmation to back me up, telling her as forcefully yet as compassionately as I could that we should be long beyond shite like that at this point, and we could still be friends if she would just cut out the horsecrap and come clean with me.
That was 3 1/2 years ago, and haven’t heard from her since.
I’m not entirely sure this is a case, though, where there’s a significant difference between the sexes. Some men certainly hold on to old flames (been there myself), but I’ve certainly seen women do, too. It’s really is an individual thing and it comes down to you as a writer to make it believable. I have no problem believing either a man or woman rekindling a flame ten, twenty, even forty years down the line. Three years is no big deal for either sex.
For my great-grandparents, ten years.
And it’s perfectly possible to hold to an old flame for yoinks. I’m about as romantic as a half brick in a sock, but there’s an old classmate of mine I wouldn’t cry about being able to catch up with 
Do I spend my life sighing over him? Hell no. But I liked him a lot more for his smarts than for his looks; we used to trade books to read during class. Even after three decades of living very different lives, I’m sure we’d still take less time to be able to finish each other’s sentences than with most of the people I’ve ever met.
I dated a girl (Cheryl) my junior year in High School. We dated for about four months. I broke it off when I knew it would no longer work out. Basically she was becoming way too obsessed with me. She could not go a single day without calling me and her behavior was striking me as just plain creepy. When I broke it off, she was devastated. During my senior year, we avoided each other. I was relieved at how well the breakup went because her behavior was really getting weird when we were dating.
Fast forward two years.
I’m in my second year at college and have been dating my now current wife for about six months. Future Mrs. D and are out on a date and walk into a McDonalds to grab something quick to eat. As we are standing in line, future Mrs. D is being very flirty… hugging and kissing me… the stuff young couples do in public… when I notice who is standing behind the counter serving a different line. It’s Cheryl. The entire time I was there, Cheryl did not take her eyes off of me. After over three years I could tell she still had feelings for me and there I was standing in line with future Mrs. D’s arms around me, hugging and kissing me.
I didn’t say a word… Not to her and not to future Mrs D.
I could tell Cheryl was devastated.
After we left, I told future Mrs. D about what happened and how Cheryl and I used to date in high school. She told me that she did notice her looking at me. We both agreed that Cheryl was still creepy. When I think back on that, I am still in awe that Cheryl had not let me go over those three years.
I should also say, the premise worked fine in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, after an even much longer period of separation, so it really isn’t some basic difference between men and women, but rather the writing to make it work. Does the OP think men have a harder time letting go than women? Or vice versa? I assume the former, given the phrasing of the OP, but I would have thought the stereotype, if there is one on this specific point, is the latter.
Hey, please join us in the NaNo thread if you haven’t already!
Women are not as different as you think. The more you think of us like alien beings, the less convincing your writing will be.
You can be in love and then accept your love is gone and move on with your life, and then have it blindside you years later. Surely.
Fourteen years ago, I fell head over heels with my husband at the same time I met another man I could have fallen in love with just as easily. We all became close friends, this man I love became my best friend. He married the girl he was dating, I married my husband, and I learned to be content knowing we both had loving marriages. Then, last year, shortly after the birth of their second child, his wife announced that she was a lesbian and is leaving him. This was when I was going through my own crisis and Sr. Weasel was gone a lot of the time due to work. I was so lonely.
And all those feelings hit me like a freight train. It drove me absolutely mad to see someone I love suffer so much. I’m talking about real love, not infatuation, the kind of love where he was there listening during the lowest part of my life, and painstakingly helped me put my marriage back together. It killed me I couldn’t do the same for him, but even in his lowest moment, feeling lonely and unloved, he was 100% about supporting my marriage because he knows that’s what is best for me.
My love for this guy in no way diminishes the love and loyalty I have toward my husband. I actually ended up telling both him and my husband how I felt because I was at a psychological breaking point and needed my husband to understand that even though I had feelings for my friend, it was my husband I needed and wanted. And miraculously, my husband did understand. He told me we had done nothing wrong and it was obvious we were both in a really vulnerable place and it was going to be okay (my husband is a saint, Exhibit A.) My friend’s reaction was essentially, ''Yeah, I love you too, but you need to focus on your marriage right now." (Seriously, and people wonder why I bristle at characterizations of what ‘men are like.’) And now the feelings for my best friend have faded into the background again, always present but not consuming me.
The feelings never go away. You just accept them and live the life you chose.