I was thinking earlier about how despite years lived in
happiness, self confidence and with mutual love, when we are left alone again,
all of our old bad habits seem to reappear as though they never left us.
My first love was a happy one, ended abruptly with a
smack on the bottom by my father who saw me and my 6 or 7 year old classmate
Claude kissing. Claude moved away by the next year and sadly I never saw him
again, although I still point him out when I show people my Kindergarten photo.
Like everyone else, eventually I dated people, although
later than most since I was a uniformed, all girl’s school girl until
University. Consequently, other than church group boys and within fairly
strictly monitored meetings, my dating life was non existent.
I don’t think that this type of life exists anymore,
since most schools are coeducational and even when they are not, social events
are organized by the schools to mix boys and girls, young men and women earlier
than ours were.
Suddenly tossed in the ‘free for all’ of university, I
recall my shock at realizing that either nobody cared about my (puritanical) values
or were too busy being free of their own for many of the things which my
proscribed life considered essential.
We learn about ourselves in our early 20’s because by
then we more or less are on our own. Among many lessons, we learn not to loan
money, to people we just met, because we are not likely to see it ever again.
We learn that people come in all shapes and sizes and
all colours and religions. Some of these we encounter in person for the first
time in our young lives. We meet people with belief systems far different than
our own. We even meet people who, to our way of thinking, don’t believe in
anything we recognize as valid. It takes a long time to sort out what we as
individuals and as new adults believe.
We fall in love, sometimes with someone who loves us
back. It hurts less when this is the case. We make friends with people and
sometimes they remain friends forever and sometimes not.
We enter relationships, some of which die a natural
death as we drift off on our separate courses in life. Then again, if we are
lucky, we meet someone who loves us who we also love and we become our own
families…of two or more.
However, Life changes. Change is the one constant we can
predict and expect and be certain of in life, even when we can’t be sure of
anything else.
When change via separation forced by illness and death,
separation of families by marriage/relationship breakdown and other events that
take us away from being a couple to being single again happen, we must teach
ourselves again to function in the world as someone no longer part of a pair.
I suspect that we fall back on what we knew before. If
this was good, it possibly is good again and we can rely upon ourselves in
confidence and believe life will work out for us fairly smoothly.
Where we were spending much of our time in groups, we
tend to try and rejoin those groups or ones of new interest to us.
As part of a couple, we changed the habits of our early
years and have usually built up a large number of friends while we were part of
a couple. Some of these remain our friends, but many, maybe even most, do not
since their situation has not changed, ours has.
Throughout my marriage I met, as I had throughout my
educational and working life, many Men. I worked in male dominated fields and
even my social/intellectual club is mostly populated by Men. Socially as a
couple however, we were among many couples usually in second marriages of very
long duration.
Men became Friends you saw among other Friends. Men
from the past who were on the periphery of my life also became Friends.
Everyone was at a distance. I would no more have considered having a meal with
a man without his wife, or another couple being present, than I would have met
a Single or Married man for a drink, without my Husband or another couple.
But life changes when you find yourself by yourself
again and you try to build/rebuild a life. It is necessary, I realize, to
forget old associations and labels for the opposite sex that are part of
relationships from the distant past.
It is valid to remember instead that there
are Men and there are Women and the interaction we have with each other
continues to bewilder and fascinate us both.
Learning how to live among people again, without
relying on people who were part of our distant past, may actually require
becoming part of new groups and interests that will better reflect our present
lives rather than trying to repeat the way we lived on our own in, what has now
become, the distant past.
I am finally beginning to understand how we limit ourselves by allowing
old dead past relationships populate a present, particularly when trying to
rebuild and establish a new life and future as a single person and individual.
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