I don’t think you’re giving them too much credit. I was the rebound-or once. I was heartbroken…CRUSHED! Then Nancy came along acting friendly. She looked good enough (great ass) loved stock car races and red whiskey…what was not to like?
The deal fell apart after several months. Some time later my sister asked me why I ever went with Nancy. “Y’all weren’t ever a match”, said Sis. “I think you just used her to get over Barbara.”
Hindsight being 20/20, I had to agree with my sister, but if you had accused me earlier of going with Nancy merely to get over Barbara, I’d have told you that you were wrong, and I would have believed that I was being honest about it.
I found myself in an interesting situation last summer. An old, close male friend moved in with me after his wife kicked him out. At the same time, I’d been dating a man for several months and had realized I loved him. All of a sudden, the girl who couldn’t get a date was juggling 2 men! :eek:
The old friend is the Fundamentalist-turned-Atheist-turned-Wiccan I’ve mentioned on this board several times. We do love each other and know each other well. We’ve seen each other through some very rough times, and I trust him as absolutely as I’m capable of. He was also married when we met, so he was strictly off limits when it came to romantic love.
The gentleman, however, is someone I’d known for less than a year and was still getting to know. I knew and appreciated his good qualities, but there was (and is) a lot I’d yet to learn, but I was looking forward to finding out.
The emotions I felt for these two men were and are different. There’s something special, a spark, if you will, that I feel for the gentleman that I don’t for my old friend. There never was a contest between the two, even if the old friend had been available (separated is still off limits in my book). While I never had to choose between the two of them (a credit to both of them), if I had had to, I’d have chosen the gentleman. Tonight, both of them will be over at my place doing laundry. While I very much enjoy my old friend’s company, he’s not the one who makes my heart beat faster.
Love is, to me a choice, at least in part. While I don’t know if I could force myself to love someone if I wasn’t already inclined to, I have met men including my old friend who were married or involved with others and ruled them off-limits because I will not intentionally damage an existing relationship. To me, it’s immoral. I still remember meeting an attractive, fun man at a gathering I was at and having a blast with him. I regretted leaving before I could give him my phone number. Several months later, at a gathering in a different city hosted by the same organization, I met him again and I was interested in him to check with mutual friends to find out if there was anything I should know about him. There was. He was married. Any spark, any hope of love, died quickly, and I did tell him off. I’ve since become friends with a different ex-wife of his, and she congratulated my on my escape.
I was taught to keep my emotions under tight rein and that one can control oneself. The marriage of a couple who were friends of the family died when he fell “madly in love” with a woman he’d met somewhere and left his wife of 40 years. I can understand pining for someone who’s not available – Lord knows, I’d done my share of that! Still, attraction is one thing; romantic love is another. Romantic love to me requires knowledge as well as a spark. Attractive as my old friend is, there never has been and never will be that spark between us, in part because when I met him he was married and his marriage was the most important thing to him. With the gentleman, that spark is there, and it’s wonderful. I waited a long time for this, wondering if I’d grown cold with the years and would never see something special in one man which makes him different from all the others. I haven’t grown cold and he was worth the wait.
CJ
Richard Pryor! :smack:
You know that letter by Saint Paul? The Love is patient, love is kind ect.
Did you ever notice that Paul never says that love has the sense that God gave geese?
I sure did.