Over the last few months I've been getting to know - again - a friend who left town in '07, lost touch with me in '09, and has returned. I say friend because essentially that is what it was, even when we dated a short while, and most certainly is, now that he's tried to get back into my life by playing the "we used to date" card.
I know people change. I have. But back in '07 - '09 I actually thought there was some good commonality in the relationship that might sustain it. So I decided to give the relationship another try, but without any high hopes that it might return to romance.
So it hasn't.
But worse, this man has convinced me that it is I who is the conservative!
What with my "first comes love, then comes marriage, and then the baby carriage (if ever)," ideals.
In my family of origin my not marrying and not having children is considered lesbian or not natural. As I've mentioned by own godmother backstabbed me with gossip, telling others that I'm the type of person who doesn't even like to hold a baby. (You can sort through these posts and find my retort.) The purpose of this blog was to support people like me who have made many micro-decisions and some big ones to not be a birth mother or parent, while knowing that there are so very many ways and reasons to be NMNK.
Now when he tells me that I'm some sort of fossil for such ancient (not just old fashioned) beliefs, because "nobody" this and that and "everybody" this and that, get's married that way, or even has those EXPECTATIONS, I feel he is mostly talking about himself.
Sure there are places on this earth and in this country, mostly places where the cost of living is low, where there are women who not only wait for love, then marry, and then have children, but also do not have careers outside the home but instead make motherhood and being a wife their career. Their choice.
I decided he and I are utterly incompatible!
Because I noticed that he lets me make dinner (and do the shopping, preparing, clean up and sending him home with left-overs) about ten times for every one time he cooks or takes me out to dinner.
I find his relationships and the "family" he has taken his ex step children to be as unstable and risky. I mean, do these now adult children who had him in their lives a few short years when they were growing up, when they all lived together, but didn't get married, actually make them think of him as dad, as in a dad that may need visitors in an assisted living someday, or a dad that needs people to bury him?
Apparently so.
I love the notion of "family as friends." I've tried it and it didn't work in a crisis.
But OK, my opinion doesn't count since it is his life.
What do I really think all this way along? That this man has been very happy for girlfriends to buy him things when they were the ones who had the money from inheritance or earning, and that is a comfort that in his generation was rare. Not exactly a free-loader but nowhere near the kind of man who marries and supports a wife and children. So he hasn't had any, while putting me down for not wanting any. You know, if you Really Want Children, there is a Very Good Chance, you Can, meet someone who Also Wants Children, and Have Them.
So he's a CLOSET NMNK!
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