Letting the shoreline go

[optimist]

To be perfectly fair to men, I think most of us girls (if not all) feel flattered and love attention from men even if we do nothing to follow through with their interest. So, your friend is generalizing on something we all do. I think rjd is right when he says it is the following through that matters.

Also in defense of your H, he could have found it awkward or even downright rude to dismiss this girl. If you see my thread from yesterday, you'll see that I am as much preaching to myself as to you .

The thing is something happened today that made me realize how much I am torturing myself (and my H, though him less thanks to my friends in the BB) with suspicion. Bear with my rather long tale: it actually has a moral to it.

This morning, at his request, I took H to the airport for a day bussiness trip to Houston. When I picked him up at one of the places he works at, I thought he smelled different and made a 'are you wearing cologne?' comment. He thrust his arm towards my nose and said 'you be the judge'. I dropped him at the airport and he actually said ILY . I asked him to leave his cell phone open, to call him if I needed to and he got a bit upset 'but I'll be in Houston' but agreed.

So I leave the airport in good spirits and return to work to the same place he had just left. I'm doing my stuff and see a note in H's handwriting saying in case of problems until 7 pm to call him at a Dallas number. I got all worked up, copied the number and spent the 1 h mixmaster-traffic-jam trip to my own office working out how to catch him in a lie. The s**-of-a-b**** had told me he was going to H and was at a Dallas number, etc,etc,etc. Luckily traffic was at about 1 mile per hour!

When I got to my office I checked the number again, ready to look it up at anywho.com and guess what? It was awfully similar to my H's cell phone number, except that there was an 8 instead of a 4. He had made a mistake when he jotted it down (and who calls his own cell phone). So, I had made a mess of a perfectly positive morning by jumping to the very worst conclusion at lightning speed! Talk about ASSumptions!

I'll quote myself in a post to Sage (am I lazy or what?)

We should get reassurance from our spouses behaviour. But part of the problem is that after all we've gone through (and are still going through) we fear to trust even in our own eyes. We trusted once and our trust was betrayed...

We have healed up to a point and are still healing. But now that things are better, the fear is more: we know it can be OK, the goal is within our reach (with time, hard work and lots of help, but it is possible)and when you know that the thought of failure, of going back to where we were becomes unbearable.

Before, at the beginning, we were in despair and we prepared for the worst. We learned that we could and would survive the breakdown of our Rs and still be strong and able to build ourselves a better life. We suffered, we cried, we learned.

But know, things are better. The unbearable pain is gone. We can sleep at night and function. Our R has hope. And we cannot bear the idea of going back where we once were. Of having suffered so much just to be back at the starting point.

So we want to be certain that it will never happen again. And of course that is not possible. The only absolute certainty after birth is death. Everything else is up for grabs .