Saturday, March 19, 2011

#228: Ex

I made the mistake of looking up an ex-girlfriend on Facebook a couple weeks ago.  It wasn't all that horrible.  Confirmed that she was still alive and still married and that was pretty much it.  However as I doing it, I got dizzy.  My pulse started racing and I got a little sick to my stomach.  Why, after all of these years, does this one girl still have such a hold on me?  I've been married over a year to a woman who I love completely and who loves me back, a woman who I thought would make a great step-mom to my son and who I wanted to be the mother of any other children I may have.  I think it is mainly the way that our relationship ended and the fact that our relationship basically became just another statistic.

After we broke up, there was a slight chance we could get back together but she had planned to move to Massachusetts and I was not going to do the long distance thing.  I now can't remember the reason she went to Massachusetts except that there was a guy there.  She'd been talking to this guy all through our relationship (and before) and telling me that she could never like him in "that way".  I don't know if she really thought that she was convincing me that she didn't like him or if she was trying to convince herself since they were separated by half a country but I knew better.  We had many fights about this.

After she moved I learned, in quick succession, that she was happier, they got married and had a child.  While I was upset at first, I got over it when I met my future wife and it didn't seem like a big deal but I kept thinking, since she was willing to dump someone she said she loved and who loved her back so horribly then they cannot break up.  They have to stay together forever.

I feel the same way about Mary Kay Letourneau who had sex with a 13-year-old student and gave birth to two of his children while in prison.  She essentially ruined her (and her husband's, her family's and her student's) lives to be with Vili and they now have to be together forever because if they aren't it is a even bigger slap in face to all the people who were hurt or embarrassed during the whole debacle.  Some people may feel that saying they have to be together forever is a little much because things happen all the time that may lead to divorce but I say that if you are willing to ruin several lives for love then you need to be together for the rest of your life.  I plan on staying with my wife for the rest of my life mainly because only an idiot would leave a wonderful woman like her.  But think about it.  *Run into ex on the street* "Hey, hi!  How are you doing?" "Oh, I'm good." "How's that marriage working out?  You know, the one you left me for after lying to me about it for nine months?" "We...got a divorce." "Oh, that's too bad.  If you hadn't kept lying to me about your relationship with him/her then I might give a damn."

But seriously, I guess it only matters that you experienced love and the amazing happiness that comes with it. I'm not angry and upset anymore because I met someone else and while I know I am not perfect but the woman I ended up with did find me perfect and obviously saw herself with me for the rest of her life unlike my previous girlfriend who, while she said she loved me and wanted to marry me, did not.

I am always amazed by the relationships I see on my high school friends Facebook pages. I wonder how the hell they wound up together but then I realize that their relationships in high school were pretty odd too. It was either they were dating someone too good for them or dating someone way too beneath them. I would like to say I dated someone at the same level as me but I will never know and maybe that's for the best because I was way too over-dramatic in high school.