Every now and then I look up people from my past just to see what they are doing. Well last night I found an ex-girlfriend, one which I very much still care about and had previously been unable to find. It was very relieving to find her and see that she was doing ok, looks like she is married as well. In finding this info, I had a couple of reactions.
The first was, strangely enough, ease. I feel more at ease now seeing that she is still out there and likely happy. It was good to see that she found someone and that she still looks like her. It made me smile. And weirdly enough I feel somewhat less stuck on her now. Well at least I feel so now, we’ll see in the next few months if that comes back.
The other thing that I got, was a wonderment of both where that relationship was and what I’m looking for now. I found her on facebook, that thing that seemingly has marked the end of all privacy and anonymity on the internet as everyone seems to sign up for it with their real names which is a definite no no in my book. Be that as it may, I saw some of the things that she “liked” and most of it was very politically charged… “I will not vote for Obama in 2012,” “Mitt Rmoney,” and “Paul Ryan for VP.”
OK, yeah these are all dated but it kind of struck me how right she went. We never really talked politics when we were together, though I think this was largely because we were young, in our early 20s and who cares at that point. I didn’t actually vote in an election for several years after that and though I was always fairly liberal, I didn’t talk about it nearly as much as I do now. She was raised in an extremely conservative household where she felt forced to go to a religious school after high school and she hated it. She wanted out of that world, but I could definitely see that if she found a guy within that world and moved from her father to him, that she would lean that way. I definitely have seen how husbands can influence political motivations of their wives in other people in my life. I have known at least one other woman who was moderate but married a deeply conservative fellow and now scoffs at the thought of voting for even moderate democrats.[1. For the record, this is not a woman thing either. I know one man who also leaned liberal before finding the girl of his dreams who happened to be conservative and now he changed his whole belief system. I do however think it is slightly more common in women than men.]
Now I know this girl and I were fairly big opposites, we knew it at the time as well. On the surface, you would have never expected the two of us together. She was innocent on the outside and not so much on the inside, and I was innocent on the inside but didn’t portray that at all. We met somewhere in the middle and that melding was both wonderful and profound, at least to me. It was a very good time though brief it was.
The thing that really made me think was that I just didn’t know her political affiliation or beliefs at all. I thought I knew this girl pretty well, and while I do think that I had a ton to learn as we only dated briefly, I now consider political beliefs to be a fairly big deal. I won’t even consider dating deep conservatives because I think they tend to be so insane as to not even be worth bothering with. So in essence, if I were to meet her today, I would have never dated her, or even considered dating her. And this is someone that I consider one of my best matches to date.
This gives me pause that maybe all my limitations that I have set for myself on whom I should and shouldn’t date are incorrect. I mean who am I to say who the perfect person for me is if this person was particularly good and would not have made the cut. Why have my expectations gone up as I have aged?
I remember a friend once told me to come up with qualifications as to what you want out of someone to date, and at the time I came up with no smoking and that was pretty much it. I took that advice to heart though and added some qualifications through the years, not many but they are there. Perhaps that wasn’t good advice though, I mean who am I to say what is good for me? I have trouble figuring that out with other aspects in life, why would I be better with women? If it works, it works, regardless of anything else.
Well except that smoking bit… I really don’t think I could deal with that.