sex and marriage/relationships

Potential is Nothing When Compared to Reality


Top Love Stories No 3

Image via Wikipedia

Conversations with this and that family member over the last few days has prompted me to once again expound on relationships of the intimate variety. If I was only allowed to give one bit of advice on the subject, it would be this:

If you cannot love someone for who he/she is right now, the odds of his/her ever being anything other than a constant source of vexation and disappointment is close to nil.

Yep, the odds are that bad.

Here’s the reality. When we meet and feel attracted there is little by way of actual fact on which to base our warming feelings for this new person. We assess our attraction, add this to what little we glean through the rather stilted courting phase and then we make up the rest to suit our own needs. In short, we invent them.

For a while, our projection of who we think our new love is works fairly well for us. They accommodate by donning their best faces and putting on their formal dinner party manners and all is truly well. But the inevitable day will arrive when something goes wrong. In these less than perfect instances our mortal, non-super hero/model personae are exposed, and depending on the magnitude of the shock to our new relationship, we’re toast. Or we live to impress another day, and another day after that until we find ourselves living with, married to and possibly breeding with someone who isn’t at all what we’d hoped they were and who stubbornly resists all our attempts to cajole/shame/nag them into being the person we wanted them to be.

Disillusionment. Betrayal. Woe.

Well, this sucks, you think. How dare this person I love not be exactly who I thought he/she could be. And they had such potential too.

And here lies the problem. You never really loved the real person at all.  As Yoda might have said, “Never your mind on where you were. What you were doing.”

It’s not your fault. We are taught to believe that even the most unsuitable for us partners have “potential”. That guy who drinks too much? He’s just young. Give him a few years, a mortgage and a kid and he’ll settle down. Little Miss Negativity? She just needs positive affirmation. Mr. Proud to have Never Read a book in his life? Exposure to the classics is the answer. And on and on the excuses roll in and pile up like Tribbles until they spill out of the closets and we are wading through them.

Some people do indeed grow into their potential, but it’s usually not a future that someone else dreamed for them. These are folks who have goals and hopes of their own, and who don’t believe that tiny fairies  and luck are responsible for dreams coming true.

It’s a disservice to the person you love to not love them for who they are right now. Certainly, encourage him/her to grow and achieve – that’s part of what couples do for each other – but don’t fault him/her in the future if he/she hasn’t fulfilled the ambitious template you created out of thin air, your childish fantasies and some Disney princess movie you saw once upon a time ago.

And never forget that not living up to one’s potential is a two-way street.

*In case you missed my BlogHer post today. Here it is.

I’m Worried About You, Honey


The day began wobbly. Literally because my ears are still somewhat plugged and the back of my throat aches, but 10 AM soccer practice will not be denied. Though some

Frost on Window

Image by Chris Campbell via Flickr

might argue that it’s hardly Dawn’s bumcrack, I consider having to be anywhere on a Saturday before noon barbaric.

The neighbor drives a school bus, in case you’ve forgotten, and with the warm weather deserting us, she is revving that yellow beast up at earlier and earlier hours. Most weekday mornings find us jarred from our short-sleeped slumbers 30 minutes or more before our own alarms sound off. The weekends, in my opinion, should be about snuggling in until it’s officially daylight at the earliest and even that is a bit too uncivilized for my aging tastes.

Cold weather has caught me unprepared. My winter coat is still in the basement closet and I am out of practice with the whole “warming up the vehicle” routine. When Dee and I made for the truck, it was cold and frosty.

And I had no idea where the ice scraper was.

“What are you doing?” Rob was at the door watching me incredulously as I attempted to scrape frost off the passenger side windows with a Starbuck’s napkin and my fingernails.

“I forgot to warm up the truck and I have no idea where the scraper is,” I thought that was a reasonable reply.

He came out in his robe, liberated the scraper from a side compartment and shooed me into the truck as he proceeded to clear the windows of Jack Frost’s handiwork.

“Your mom is silly,” he told Dee as he kissed her good-bye and gave me the “I can’t believe you sometimes” look when he kissed me.

Fast forward.

Practice is done. I managed to stay upright and wrangle a few groceries while Dee continued her march to someday dominating at the World Cup and we were home. I’d phoned Rob to check on his plans to run into the city while we were out, but he’d decided to wait for us.

“Wouldn’t you like an outing?”

I love outings. Rob’s idea of outings typically involve a lot of driving with Clark Griswold-ish stops at various home handyman fave spots, but as I seldom make it farther from home than grocery or yoga class – I am easy to please.

But after we entered the house, Rob crooks his finger and asks me to come upstairs with him. He needs to show me something.

“I’m getting worried about you, Honey.”

Wha???

The last time he was “worried” he thought I’d been putting tea bags in the paper recycling and it was actually him that did that.

I reached the bedroom and he showed me one of his white socks and one of Dee’s leggings.

“Did you fold these together?” he asked. “I found them rolled together.”

It took a minute but I remembered that months ago, Dee had rolled her legging together with her Dad’s sock as a joke.

“Dee did that.” I explained, “as a joke, but thanks for jumping to the conclusion that I am demented.”

The girl child lay on her bed cackling and Rob looked relieved and a bit chagrined.

*Still blogging for NaBloPoMo, catch today’s here and this is the last time I am linking to the Top 25 Canadian Mom Blogs list contest though the contest will continue on without further notice from me.

It’s the Little Frustrations


The trouble with people reading your blog is that you lose it as an outlet for meaningful thought and feeling processing. It becomes a venue for others as they search for

A couple dating in a cafe.

Image via Wikipedia

information, entertainment and  a place to share their own musings.

And I am not complaining. There was a time when few people even stumbled across this blog let alone came in search of it. Progress has its drawbacks as well as its perks.

Sometimes, however, I still feel the need to mindlessly run thither and yon across the keyboard, qwertying my way back to a more zen place.

Lately, the search terms have tipped decidedly in favor of widower dating queries. They read like lamentations. Desperate pleas for any scrap of insight, inspiration or tool to help the googler make sense of what is more likely fairly obvious but they just aren’t ready to accept.

Sometimes people who’ve been widowed are dating even though they aren’t ready, and sometimes widowed daters are just dating without any intent beyound spending a few hours here and there, sharing good times and possibly swapping bodily fluids.

The problem? Is the dead body in the room. The single and the divorced, who have only their perceptions of dating to work with, mistakenly place too much emphasis on the idea that widowed people are emotionally shell-shocked and that any hesitation, game playing or even hurtful behavior is somehow mitigated by this common grief myth.

The best thing a person dating a widow/er can do is ignore that fact. The widow thing. Just expect the same courteous, interested and emotionally genuine behavior that one expects of everyone they date. Be upfront about how you feel, what you are looking for and where your personal “crap” lines are draw. Remember too that dating is about getting to know someone not fixing them. Falling in love with someone’s potential is stupid regardless. A widowed man may seem like a great catch because he was a terrific husband to someone who is dead and can’t actually attest to the veracity of that anymore, but if he is a crappy boyfriend, odds are he wasn’t all that great of a husband either.

But here’s something I have noticed. Women tend to fill in the gaping holes in a relationship with narratives they will pull from the thin air if needs be but more often are variations on past relationships they have had with other men.

Don’t do that.

DSC_0052

And here’s why. Heartbreak might have common denominators but the most basic fact of being widowed is that someone died on you. Literally died. A person with whom you plighted your troth, shared with more intimately than anyone you’ve ever known so far. You had sex with this now dead person. Possibly made babies with them. They took all your secrets with them when they left. You will not see them again across a room or when you swap children on weekends or inadvertently run into them when they are out to dinner with their new love. They are dead. The dead molder or are scattered to the wind or sit like knick knacks on a mantle.

Relationships end. Painfully. The lingering can be bitter, filled with recriminations, animosity and torturing self-doubt. But relationships, though coupled with people, are not people. You do not go to the morgue to identify a dead relationship any more than you hold its hand while it sucks for its last breaths like a fish on dry dock. It’s heartbeat doesn’t gallop like a herd of frightened horses beneath your fingertips before fluttering to stillness like a butterfly smashed up against the windshield of a car at highway speeds.

The flotsam of a relationship is divided up with each partner taking his/her half. Dead people are not very helpful cleaning out closets, basements or alerting the post office to their change of address.

As much as you might be tempted to overlay your break up experiences onto your widowed boyfriend, it will be an ill fit, resulting in continued misunderstanding and frustration. And it’s the little frustrations that sink budding love and undermine existing love.

Here is what matters:

  • People who love you show you that love consistently through their actions
  • Falling in love with someone’s potential is like having an affair with your own reflection.
  • Being in love with “being in love” leads to disappointment and frustration for both parties.
  • Everyone comes with a past. Fixate on it and be miserable or live in the now and build a future.
  • While you can impress someone with your patience and understanding, they won’t necessarily grow to love you for it.
  • Make sure you are over your own issues before assuming your problems stem from your mate’s “issues”.

Love is actually pretty simple, but it’s the most simple concepts that are the hardest to grasp, or so I learned during the years I spent teaching 7th graders. Abel Keogh recently wrote a piece about trusting your gut. Love is love. It feels right and gets better over time because even the issues that come up as relationships progress become a part of the growth rather than detours or roadblocks that must be continually negotiated . Doubts that become nags are trying to tell you something you need to know. Don’t rationalize them away. Don’t assume that the issues that keep or kept you from moving on after your last relationship can help you understand his or that patience is actually an admirable virtue where romance is concerned.*

He loves you when he shows you day in and out without time-outs.

*I have to admit a certain curiosity about the whole “be patient with me/I need more time” excuse that my gender so willingly accepts and would love to meet the woman who turns it around and says “I could use a bit more patience as I learn to put up with your need to keep your late wife’s toothbrush and a bit more one on one time dating that isn’t a dolled up booty call.” But I am unlikely to ever find her.

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