Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site pucc-h Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!CS-Mordred!Pucc-H:aeq 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.