A couple of days ago I was on the phone having a long chat with a female friend of mine who I’ve not had the pleasure of speaking to for a good couple of months. I caught her up on developments in my life (that took a while as you can imagine, thank goodness she rang me) right up to my new relationship and all of the details about how that was going. So she kindly decided to hit me with this bombshell:
“You’re not ready for that yet. For a complicated relationship, I mean. You need something a bit… simpler.”
To which my reply was “what do you mean by complicated?”
She said “Well… you’re just lonely. What you need is some sex, cuddles and someone to veg out on the sofa with twice a week. Oh, I don’t mean one-night-stands, you need a hassle-free relationship for a month or two. That’d sort you right out. Then you’d be ready.”
“Ready for what, precisely?” I replied trying to figure out where she was going with this whilst having an eerie feeling I knew exactly where she was going.
“Oh, you know, for the whole love, moving in, having babies thing. You’re rebounding, you feel lonely and normal enough to want a girl’s company but you are not ready to make a true commitment: particularly a complicated one. You’ve only been able to hold yourself together for the last month or so, let alone make decisions of that magnitude. You’re doing too much too quickly, you need to slow down. You’re not ready.”
“I’m not ready?” I replied with perhaps a touch too much sarcasm, “I feel ready.”
“Trust me. I’m your girlie with no vested interest: you’d be making a serious mistake going for a complex serious relationship at this time. You’ll hurt someone and that someone is probably going to be you. You sure you got enough in reserve yet to deal with that?”
Compromise time. I needed to think this all over, so I rashly promised “I’ll ring my Mum, run it by her and see what she says.”
“If you present it exactly like you did to me, I’ll bet you 50 euros payable next time you’re over that she’ll agree with me completely. 50 euros…” She paused briefly before continuing “… I’ve known you for a long time, so I’ll bet a further 50 euros that you’ll take the bet and lose.”
Of course, I took both the bets (don’t I ever learn?)
I was sitting on the sofa, thinking about what she’d said and the more I thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make. It was time to ring Mum. The phone rang. It was Mum. How do mothers just know when you need to speak to them? Oh, I understand what a coincidence is, but still – it did appear to be perfect timing: almost to the second.
I kept my promise to my female friend: I presented the facts (as I understood them) to my Mum in exactly the same way as I had to her. And Mum’s answer?
Her answer means I’m 100 euros down next time I’m on the continent. Either that, or I can spend the next five years avoiding Germany until she’s forgotten, but she didn’t forget the other bet with her that I lost either (despite the currency change: she helpfully converted Deutsche Marks to Euros for me in a handy e-mail reminder), so I’m probably screwed unless the Euro collapses. You’ve probably guessed that I’d be lost without female friends, they’re as close as I’ll ever get to having a girl-to-boy dictionary of my own.
The second opinion put my brain into ‘Spock mode’ where it calmly analyses the situation in a reasonably detached fashion. I even made a list of pros and cons to help visualise what was happening. Nope, they’re right, I’m wrong. I’ve missed being able to step back and view the big picture: it is a skill that I believe is all part of that great thing that we call “wisdom”. I lost this skill for several months, and even now it needed two separate opinions from outsiders before my mind was capable of putting 2 and 2 together and coming up with 4 rather rather than 69.
Sometimes when you’re in a situation it is hard to step back. If you’re emotionally weaker than you normally are, it’s even harder. By speaking to someone I’d not spoken to for a long while and feeling good enough to be able to talk sensibly I received a gift that I would potentially have missed for weeks: a valid fresh perspective.
To be honest, all the evidence was already there given I’ve written this, this, this and this in the past weeks, I just failed to put it all together coherently.
——
I’m me again; that’s the scary bit on the road-to-recovery over with. I can afford to walk rather than run and besides which, you see a lot more when you’re walking because you have time to look around you. Time to stop and smell the roses.
Wood. Trees. Can’t see one for the other sometimes. Perhaps I need glasses.
