Here I am almost 45 year old and alone and lonely on Valentines day. I don't feel sorry for myself being in this situation, beacause it was my decision in the preceding year to leave a bad marriage. The loneliness I feel today feels far better than the togetherness one could experience with being with an alcoholic. An improved but emptier life.
Maybe it something in our primate hard wiring, but somehow something does feel more natural if we are in pairs versus being alone. Maybe it is because in the right circumstances the two correct individuals are greater than the sum of the parts. In the case of my marriage and most of my friends marriages that have failed in the last year, the two were less than the sum of the parts. One spouse was the parasite while the other spouse (me included) was the host.
If you are together with someone today, and if that person makes your life better, you are lucky. Now if you make the person's life better who makes your life better you are a functioning pair, and you are both extremely lucky. If you make the life worse for the person who makes your life better, pull up your bootstraps and stop being a parasite.
I know some very fine people whose marriages have failed because they reached a breaking point. They could not keep carrying a bloodsucker of either the financial, or mental/emotional(substance abuser/nut-ball) variety, and something inside almost dies. Each of these friends when I had presented them with the hypothetical question of:
"What if your former spouse was a cinder block, benign and inert?"
Would answer with tears in their eyes;
"I would still be happily married"
It almost seems tragic. We would be happy to have remained in the relationship had our ex spouse been able to achieve the functionality of a cinder block. Yet when we are alone, it almost seems that we set impossibly high standards for someone to cross before we get in another relationship. Its almost that we have things backwards. Maybe we should be setting the standards lower when looking for someone to start a relationship with, but have a high threshold that must be attained for the relationship to continue.
To everybody reading this blog who is in a relationship where you would not trade your partner/spouse for a cinder block, I tip my hat to you. Somehow through intelligence, luck or just plain hard work you have managed to achieve something I would give almost anything to have, a functioning relationship.
Hopefully the Heretic's ship hasn't sailed by, because I know from the bottom of my heart I can add more to someones life than a cinder block.
Is there anybody out there?
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