Like a Horse and Carriage

My boyfriend and I broke up not long after I came home from Beijing. Technically, we agreed to take a break. In my mind, that is basically saying it's over. If I want to be with someone, I don't want them dating other women. And when men want a break, that generally means they want to sleep around. I have no interest in men who want to be teenagers.

As breakups/breaks go, I took it pretty well. When I came home from Beijing, I had plenty of other things to worry about. Dating was not at the top of my list. Not coincidentally, that was one of the reasons we took a break.

Sometimes relationships end and those involved decide to be friends. Some people can make that work from time to time. Some people never can. I always had a feeling that we could be friends, or at least remain in contact. Our break and/or breakup was amazingly civil. But we did absolutely none of the things that friends do together and made no effort to keep in touch. That might have been because I was preoccupied with other things.

Then he proposed.

He does not want me to share personal information online, which is one of the things I always liked about him. He finds Facebook as destructive as I do. So right now, in this very moment, I'm typing up what I want to say, but I don't know if I will post it. I suppose I could make it as impersonal as possible, but how little can I say when talking about why I turned down a marriage proposal? I could tell him that only people I actually know ever read this blog, but he would tell me how that makes it worse.

I said no for a few reasons. We dated for just under a year. That is entirely too soon for me. We never lived together, and the thought never crossed my mind. I moved in with my last boyfriend entirely too soon, but at least we were together for eight years, and never even came close to marriage. I like to take my time.

I also considered that he asked for all the wrong reasons. I was in a bit of a fender bender not too long ago. He worried that I went to first base with Death and might have come close to going all the way. That is the kind of thing that scares people. I understand that completely. It was not a walk in the park for me either. I'm grateful to have people in my life who worry about me. When I was missing, from their point of view, they worked hard to find me. My best friends flew to a foreign country to bring me home. That takes more effort than clicking the thumbs up button. That is real world friendship. I'm not alone, which is wonderful, but not reason enough to get married.

There is also the issue of cognitive deficits. When your brain gets cut open, there is always the very real risk that you might make some really bad decisions. Your judgment and reason can go a little fuzzy. It is not the best time to make major life choices. Call me crazy, but I only want to get married once. I know everyone thinks their first marriage will last even though the odds are not great, but getting hitched while your marbles are still a little loose can't possibly improve those odds.

I never met his family. That is a big deal to me. You learn a lot about a person from their family. His is 8,000 miles away, so it's no mystery why we never met, but they talk to each other all the time. They live in Cape Town, so that would have been a great trip. It looks like a beautiful city. The closer the family is, the more you marry them as well as the man. I can't marry total strangers.

We also took a break when I came home. That kind of bothers me. If he can't handle me when my brain is cut open, I have mystery fluids oozing out of creative places, and I'm babbling incoherently in broken Chinese and Shakespearean English … I would swear I had a point to make at the beginning of that sentence. I don't blame him for freaking out when I looked my worst, but when you marry someone, you have to assume that their body is going to go downhill sooner or later. I can forgive friends who abandoned me when they were afraid of how to react, but a husband has to be there for you no matter what.