Intimacy
Mood:  lucky
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I am so lucky that Tad is still my friend after all these years. We hadn't talked since my birthday in February, but after several months of phone tag, he called me Monday night. He said I hadn't sounded at all happy in my last several phone messages and he had to call to make sure his friend wasn't going crazy, and if I were, to make sure that it was at least just the usual flavor of crazy. We were able to talk for several hours. He told me about recent difficulties he had with one of his women friends that sounded an awful lot like other difficulties he's had with other young women. It seems Tad is capable of forming intensely intimate bonds with women, but unfortunately, it sounds as though the intensity eventually sucks all the air out of the relationship. I, on the other hand, am suffering from the exact opposite: intense neglect.

I asked Tad what reasons he had for telling me on my wedding day, "You chose well." He told me (all good reasons), and as he did, I remembered that he had told me before. He also listened, without laughing, to a dream I had had that morning about a former boyfriend. He was able to explain to me why that former relationship was the way it was, which helped me understand why I keep going back to it in my head, and why it's also not a useful model of a long-term relationship. There's a good chance he's explained this to me before, too, and I promise not to forget this time! I blame my memory problems on a highly developed corpus collosum--because I'm always zipping back and forth between the two hemispheres of my brain, I never know where I was when I learned something and so can never find the pathway back to it. You'd think, though, with major emotional insights like these that I'd be able to find a way to hold onto them. And just because Tad remembers EVERYTHING doesn't mean that I get to abuse him by making him repeatedly remind me of what has happened in my life and why this or that event is significant!

One of the reasons Tad thought Hans was a good match for me was because he wrote such amazing wedding vows (and cried while he read them), and, very obviously made me very happy in so doing. (I reminded Tad of the Billy Joel & Christy Brinkley situation: Christy acknowledged that Billy was a musical genius but said she needed more than one song a year to tell her how he felt about her.) So I went looking for the paper copies of the vows we each wrote and unfortunately they weren't where I thought in the Guest Book with all the wedding cards I saved. Which means they're with the wedding planning notebook I kept, and I don't know where exactly that is among all the moving boxes right now. (And I can't watch it on video because the VCR isn't hooked up to the t.v. yet.) I will keep trying to find them, though, because I'm considering asking Hans to write new vows with me now as part of our counseling work (provided we actually make it long enough to start counseling--last night he suggested that due to the crazy hours of his new job he may not be able to join me in sessions until December, and not October as we're currently planning). I read some articles online last night about the "maintenance" phase of marriage - the phase that follows wooing and the honeymoon, the phase you stay in until one of you dies or leaves. I have some strong objections to some of the articles' assumptions, and I'm at least glad that beginning next week I'll have someone to talk to about things like this.

In the meantime, I've decided that it might help me feel loving emotions if I engage in loving actions, so I'm driving to Kroger in Durham--the closest one to the new house--tonight after work to buy rice flour, tapioca flour, and guar gum to make Hans a double batch of gluten-free lemon squares. He really is having a tough time with the new call center, and it would make him very happy to come home to find his favorite dessert waiting. Wish me luck that Kroger has all the ingredients I need!