So, here I am again listening to Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs, alone. Wondering if it is my destiny to become a spinster and if I should perhaps accept this fate gracefully, start acquiring cats and tea cosies and get busy with embroidery and marmalade making instead of continuing on the quest for romance and true love.
I can’t even blame my upbringing for my spectacular lack of luck in the love life department, after all my sister had the same one as me and she’s been happily married for years. Am I just a square peg trying to fit into a round hole, I wonder? Am I as commitment phobic as the next (single) person? Am I just asking too much expecting (or hoping for) someone to take me on when I’ve got two very young children? I don’t know. It’s true that I love my freedom and the idea of all doors and possibilities being open to me…that I have a deep ambivalence towards marriage, wedding rings and the thought of promising that I’ll love someone forever. In the words of Holly Near, “how can anyone know if love is forever or only for a moment?”
It’s also possible that it might seem easy to make a commitment like that to someone with whom I shared a deep and enduring love, and that if I was in a relationship like that it would be the obvious choice. I read about couples, and observe in my life some of the couples I know and see that they have something very special. I’m realising now that I’ve never really known a love like that and I do yearn for it. To find someone who loves and wants to be with me as much as I love and want to be with them. Someone with whom the depth of feeling and level of attraction is mutual rather than one sided for a change.
I’ve been on both sides of an unequal attachment during the last year and both ways round are painful and difficult. The lesson I am carrying from these recent experiences is that I must be more cautious in future….get to know a potential lover first…not dive in straight away with someone I hardly know, exciting and tempting though it may be.
A year of more thoughtfulness, more integrity and honesty and more consideration of the possible consequences of the decisions I make. And hopefully not spinsterhood ahead, maybe just a quiet time for Becky in 2008.
Tags: spinster, romance, married, freedom, love, commitment, attraction, attachment, integrity, honesty
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