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Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Amnesia

A friend wrote this a while back, thinking about their prior engagement and how the feelings that had been so built up had faded in a matter of months once the relationship was no longer. They showed it to me this morning, and I thought it was interesting, so the friend said I could post it.
Amnesia
It's amazing that you can invest so much into a relationship, and give it all up in a matter of weeks, or days.

I always learned that love does not exist until after marriage. I believed what I had been taught, convinced that anyone who spoke otherwise was wrong. When I met "The One" I was nervous that the three powerful words would be spoken before they were meant. Shortly after the proposal I found myself using the unforgivable phrase myself. There was just nothing else to explain our feelings for one another. It was love.

And so I believed in US. I invested everything I had.

How one could forget all the tangible feelings and emotions that took months or years to build up in a matter of a few weeks is beyond me. Does it make a person "cold"? Perhaps it is simply G-d helping them out, making the search for "The Right One" easier and less painful...

7 comments:

  1. Oh, so much to say I don't even know where to begin.

    interesting post, ezzie...

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  2. Oh, so much to say I don't even know where to begin.

    Try. I'm curious what people think about this one...

    I found it very thought-provoking in a number of ways.

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  3. 3 points before this thread gets going (if it gets going):

    1 - Think long and hard before getting into your personal, and I use that word in the most serious way possible, experiences online - especially in a public forum

    2 - Think long and hard before commenting on another's personal experiences online.

    3 - Not everything is translatable to the written word and not everything is understandable to the non-experienced (heck, some things are not understandable to the experienced)

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  4. FTR - Not my own, obviously. Don't know if you're a regular reader or not, but we tend to avoid actual personal things here.

    2 - Of course. This post is not about specifics whatsoever.

    3 - Of course. And true on both counts.

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  5. Well said, for the record.
    That's why we have anonymous blogs.

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  6. I wish I could get some of that amnesia.

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  7. OK I'll start (carefully).

    I always learned that love does not exist until after marriage.

    This one is a tricky but interesting issue, unrelated to the person in the post, but to Jewish education in general. The way it was taught to us was similar, but I think that the emphasis was specifically because we were in our teenage years and every guy who had a "relationship" with a girl was being shown by mentors that they didn't know what love was enough to say they "loved" some girl. Love is obviously a very tricky thing to define, but the emphasis some schools place on "love doesn't exist before marriage" can be very confusing for people just a couple of years later when many are looking to marry. I am not sure what the answer to this is; I think that an acknowledgment that a person should have feelings for a person they are looking to marry is an important one. Schools can emphasize that the puppy love of teens is just that without degrading the concept of love in general. At the same time, love obviously does get stronger as a couple works through different stages of life.

    How one could forget all the tangible feelings and emotions that took months or years to build up in a matter of a few weeks is beyond me. Does it make a person "cold"? Perhaps it is simply G-d helping them out, making the search for "The Right One" easier and less painful...

    This is the other part I found very interesting, for a number of reasons. Different people react to such things in different ways. Some seem to immediately 'lose' that connection; for most I think it ebbs away slowly over time; and some have a harder time getting over some relationships for any number of reasons.

    Certainly those who can get over it quickly are not "cold" - often, if a relationship is broken, it's something that built up for a bit. Even if not, it could be something that causes the person to lose some of what they may have liked about the other, or some kind of respect or trust.

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