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From: aeq@pucc-h (Jeff Sargent)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Re: Open suggestion to Jeff Sargent
Message-ID: <1638@pucc-h>
Date: Wed, 9-Jan-85 00:08:14 EST
Article-I.D.: pucc-h.1638
Posted: Wed Jan  9 00:08:14 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 9-Jan-85 03:27:21 EST
References: <1249@hou4b.UUCP>
Organization: 1-800-GO-NORAD
Lines: 48

Beginning with comments from Mark Terribile (hou4b!mat):

> You didn't simply believe the person you were when I met you, you accepted
> yourself as that person.  A bit uneasily, perhaps, you weren't quite at
> home with it, and it showed, but that's alright.

Obviously I wasn't quite at home with it; if I had been, I wouldn't have been
so destroyed by messing up a relationship; but then, if I had been, I might
not have messed up the relationship.

> Look, the first step in becoming the person that you want to be is liking the
> person that you're trying to become.

Isn't that the second step?  The first is figuring out what to become.

> Accepting not only who you are but who you WANT TO BE might help.

This is the area that I'm still working on; I still find it most difficult
to trust my own wants, because I know that they have usually led me into
notable difficulties and pains, which felt the worse since the desires were
themselves largely the results of notable difficulties and pains.  I have
recently come to the realization that I don't need to worry about all those
past agonies -- that in a sense, they don't exist; but that doesn't change
the fact that I am presently still an incomplete person.  I look at my
feelings about various women, and in almost all cases I recognize that what
fires my attraction to them is their possession of a character quality which
I lack, but know I should have (or wish I could have); I find myself wishing
that they would somehow, in some way I don't define, impart that quality to
me; and/or I wish that they would forgive me for not having that quality and
still accept me.

The only trouble with all this is that I haven't the least idea what to do
if a woman whom I find attractive feels -- or at least appears to feel --
the same way about me.  It's such a novel situation that I hesitate to plunge
ahead with it...I suppose largely for fear that a relationship that starts
out wonderful can get mucked up all too easily, and perhaps for fear of the
dull ordinariness, the necessity for concerns about small, uninteresting
things, which I suppose would eventually creep into any relationship.  Also
I wonder how much of my attraction to her is based merely on the fact that
she SEEMS to find me attractive, without terrifying me by presenting me with
the yawning voids of her own needs.  (One other difficulty is that she lives
hundreds of miles from here and she's not on Usenet!  Having to use ordinary
means of communication is appalling, and that's only 1/2 :-).)

-- 
-- Jeff Sargent
{decvax|harpo|ihnp4|inuxc|ucbvax}!pur-ee!pucc-h:aeq
Proud owner of two Control Data doorstops.