A couple of months ago, I met a man I wasn’t particularly interested in. Actually, that happens all the time. What makes this man worth mentioning was that I was pretty interested in the life he was leading. It looked a lot like the life I had in the good days of my marriage, when my family was involved in our community and my husband and I spent a lot of time actively parenting and younger people in the neighborhood came to us for help and advice. In short, it looked a lot like a life I’d already been happy in, a life where I’d found my true heart.
I wasn’t attracted to the guy. We didn’t have much to talk about. I don’t think he was particularly attracted to me. And yet, I had the occasional little vision of a life in his world. I’m not the kind of woman who aspires to get married again or who is inclined to get ahead of herself in relationships. I’m very much about taking things as they come, for what they are in the moment, and not trying to guess or control what they might become one day. I don’t need to give things labels–not even when I’m really interested. But sitting across from this man I wasn’t especially drawn to, feeling no particular spark, I envisioned cooking in his house, dropping by his place of business, working side-by-side with him on some community project.
I was, I realized pretty quickly, thinking like a woman who dates men because they have money or vacation homes or take them to the right parties or buy really good gifts. The only difference was that what I was coveting wasn’t flashy or exclusive. It was just your basic middle-class, traditional family life. It sounds less sinister at a glance (or whatever the audio version of a glance might be), but it really wasn’t any different at all: I was contemplating a relationship not for the person I’d be in it with but for the external trappings that he offered.
Sometimes it’s hard to separate those things out and recognize what’s really drawing us. I think I’m fortunate in this case (and he is, too) that there was so very little attraction between us. With just a little bit of a spark, we might both have convinced ourselves that it was something entirely different than it was. Instead, reality dawned pretty quickly. It was both a relief and a disappointment, but it was also enlightening. I learned something about what I want out of the next phase of my life, and I learned what I would have thought I already knew: that those things aren’t enough to make it the life I want.
