Monday, April 09, 2012

Addendum to 'Yes I went there'

After some consultation with married friends, it has been brought to my attention that looking someone up and then telling them you had a crush on them when you have a wife at home serves no purpose except hurting your wife and being selfish.

I have come to the conclusion that I agree. I would not object (as my friend C would) to connecting with childhood friends, but telling them about past crushing feelings seems really self-serving and therefore kind of bad. Very hurtful to the wife. Also, the brunch this weekend proved to me that said childhood friend doesn't really have an interest in ME as a human being that is/was a friend, but only an interest in me as I relate to him and his memories of me. Does that make sense?

This man is not interested in true, reciprocal friendship which means I will no longer be responding to his requests to see me when he visits Chicago. Glad to know this, too bad I had to waste a beautiful morning figuring it out.

Happy Monday!

2 comments:

SarahA said...

I would say it's like trying to recapture the feelings from back then. Not because they're unhappy but because they're trying to...recapture their youth sounds dumb. It's like when you listen to a song you used to love when you were in college. You get that reminiscing feeling. Of course, that's fine but friendship is about remembering the old time while also making new memories.

ElleG77 said...

That's a really astute observation, Sarah. I think that is exactly what it is. In this case, however, it was apparent to me that the 'making new memories' part was not on the agenda. He wants to assuage some long-standing nostalgia but not necessarily do the work to build on top of the childhood memories and associations. I guess I'm resentful about that, especially because I already experienced feelings of insecurity about meeting someone from my past and being afraid (however irrationally) of them viewing me as some sort of failure. (why are you still single he asked me...i don't know a single woman asked that question who doesn't feel awful when it gets asked)