Why I'm not worried about A**

I began to write this as a response to VirginiaGal's comment on my last post, but then I saw that I was going to ramble, so I figured I should turn it into a post.

From age 20 to 24, my brother dated a young woman we'll call A**. She was a sweet girl, not unlike other girls he'd dated before or since; two years his junior. She was really in love with him and he with her for a while. But my brother has always intended on getting married at some point in his life. And several months before they broke up, he took stock of their relationship and his feelings toward her. "No matter how hard I tried, Molly, I just couldn't picture myself married to her," he'd tell me. And even if he later decided to never marry, he felt it unfair to drag her along. Better to cut loose while they're both still young and can find other happiness than to drag it out into something that will eventually make both of them unhappy. (Side note: the brother of a friend of mine, in his early 30s, recently broke up with his girlfriend of a decade. He'd never wanted to marry; she did. He eventually pulled the plug about a year ago. Basically, he wasted 10 years of her time for something that only one of them wanted.)

Though I'm sorry she had her heart broken - and I know Bro was very sad himself for a while - I ultimately don't feel sorry for A**. Firstly, she's moved on to another boyfriend with whom she seems happy. Plus she and Bro have remained (amazingly) decent friends. Would it have been better if Bro had stayed with A**? She was a nice girl and he loved her, but it's possible to love someone and know they're not "the one," for dreadful lack of a better noun. You have to love someone fully. The person you marry should excite you mentally and spiritually as well as sexually. You have to spend the REST OF YOUR LIFE with this person. Is it fair to someone to partner with him/her when you know ultimately that you're not delivering the goods he/she needs or that you're not getting from him/her what you need? She didn't challenge him and didn't inspire him to be the best him he could be. With the current girlfriend, I see Bro becoming a more mature young man. He's developing new interests and returning to old interests. He's happier. It makes me happy. I don't know if A** has found her lifetime mate, but if and/or when she does, that person should inspire her to be the best A** she can be. Anything less would be a rip-off to both partners.

When I was in college, I remember seeing a video from a "relationship specialist" who claimed that the partner you spend the rest of your life with should inspire admiration in you, and you in the partner. I can't remember anything else in the video, but who the hell cares? He was right in that. It's possible to love other people, but I think mutual admiration is one of the key ingredients to that love that sustains couples through the slings and arrows of life. I loved some prior paramours, but lacked that mutual admiration. The same is probably true of Honey.

And it has to be symmetrical admiration. How many girls did I see in high school and college who were just over the moon about their boyfriends and their boyfriends just took them for granted? (Or vice-versa?) Should those boys have proposed to the girls because the girls loved them? Fast forward 20 years: who is happy in that relationship? I've seen these people in airports. The woman is very clearly miserable and the man is just engrossed in his crossword or sudoku (he turned off years ago) and nary a friendly glance is exchanged between them. And it's not just airport layover misery. You can smell marital disdain. Bro may have inspired A** to be a great person, but she didn't inspire him. And hopefully A** has found - or will find - the person who will inspire her to be not just great, but the best A** she can be.

My only hope for Bro is that his current girlfriend is as inspired by him as he is by her. I think she is.

From what I've experienced in my marriage, and from what I've witnessed in other relationships, choosing a mate isn't just about finding someone you love and you'd like to have children with. It's about who you want to not have children with as well. (Not every relationship produces offspring, whether by choice or chance. And even when they do, kids leave the nest, eventually. Who do you think you're gonna have to stare at for the remainder of the time?) It's about choosing a partner to weather the illnesses of your family members with, to weather your own illnesses with, to weather shitty jobs with, to weather personal depressions and downfalls with and even to weather periods of "why the hell did I get married" with? Hard times can bring resentment of one's partner even in the happiest of relationships. People can love each other, but if they don't love each other fully, or have that mutual admiration, then the resentment that arises from the hard times can turn into disdain, which can be outright poisonous. And of course, sadly, sometimes even the most stable and happy relationships crumble under the weight of outside sadness. But why stay with someone when you can smell the toxicity from down the road?

I really am sorry Bro broke A**'s heart a few years ago. Life is hard and only gets harder as we age. Staying with her would have caused her much, much more pain in the long run and would've made him sadder in the long run, too.

Looking ahead in my family

It's ten to ten, so let's see if I can whip this out before I want to brush my teeth and hit the hay.

Honey and I went over our anticipated finances for the coming year. I'm feeling much better about the year to come. I'm making more money in my current job than in my last, and Honey has gotten the standard yearly upward bump, so we're better in the piggy than I had thought. Of course, having spent my adolescence poor as a church mouse, I have a constant fear that we could sneeze and end up destitute. Not that that can't happen, but just that I doubt it will anytime soon. Whew!

Speaking of having enough money ... my little brother is probably going to propose to his girlfriend this year. They moved in together this past summer and he'd told me before then that he was sure she was "the one." They've been talking about it between themselves and agree. So I'm happy for him. Especially since she's so much smarter and more sophisticated than his prior interests. But the money part comes in here: he wants to get her a nice ring and is being pressured into the "two-months salary" propaganda that the wicked diamond industry has been snookering love-lorn guys with for years. His girlfriend is not materialistic (despite being well off - woohoo! Way to go, Bro!), so she doesn't care if he spends 2 - 3 months salary on her ring. But I think he's also finding that even if he doesn't cave to the bullshit amounts DeBeers and company guilts men into spending, rings which are something more than a skinny band with a diamond, are higher than $2K or so - the price range I suggested he look in. Anyway, my advice to him was that he should never let money be a reason not to get married. You're going to be with the same person forever, a ring is a ring and a wedding is only one day out of a lifetime (no matter how bloody kick-ass a day it is). I hope he listens. Poor boy, though. I understand the impulse to get something really spectacular for someone you think is really spectacular. A friend of ours had his wife's ring designed, so maybe I'll ask him who he used. I wonder if it would be cheaper to buy the diamond separately and then set it in another ring.

But then that got me thinking about social pressures, and I promise to blog on that more in the future, but it is now 10:03!! And I'm trying to be a good girl and get to bed at a decent hour this year.

Hola, 2008!

I'm exhausted and have to get up early for work, tomorrow, but I want to start the new year off right with a post.

First off: THANK GOD, WE'RE BACK IN AN EVEN NUMBERED YEAR! ... though I suck at math, I have a thing for easy patterns and even numbers, particularly even numbered years. I LOVE even numbered years. Maybe it's because even numbers represent symmetry, where odd numbers don't. eh ... I digress.

I hope everyone reading this enjoyed whatever manner they rang in the new year. We had a few friends over to play board games and switched on the TV to watch the ball drop a couple of minutes before the year rang in. Man, Carson Daly looked bad! Low-key and fun. I'm down with that.

I insisted that we have black-eyed peas for breakfast. Honey hates them, but he'll have a few forkfuls to appease me. It's the only time of the year he eats them. But that's okay; it's the only time it counts!

This afternoon, Honey and I went to the local movie theater. I assumed if we got there with 10 or 15 minutes to spare, we could get a good seat. After all, yesterday that was the case when I went to the same theater with a girlfriend. Not so much! We were in the second row and craned our necks to watch Juno. It was worth it, though. Fantastic movie. I highly recommend it. I laughed. I cried. I laughed and cried simultaneously. Come to think of it, that was a great movie to start a new year off with: it's all about birth and choices and hope. And the soundtrack was great. I think we'll buy the soundtrack, soon, and the movie when it comes out on DVD. It was so great. After an hour or so at the local IKEA on a (successful) hunt for a lamp, we ended the day with dinner with friends. It was the perfect way to close a day and begin a year.

So there's my boring day. I wish I had something profound to write, but I don't. I just needed to write at all. WRITE, WRITE, WRITE! I hope 2008 brings you and yours nothing but good fortune!