I set out to find a husband who was the exact opposite of my father. My father has brown eyes and I have always felt somehow threatened by men with brown eyes, even though I did date a couple. I was always attracted to guys with blond hair and blue eyes.
I never dated a "worldly" man; my boyfriends were all college students. I was always drawn to younger men. I guess I felt safer with them.
Anyway, my father is dark-eyed and somewhat "swarthy" looking (French-Canadian descent). My H is blond, blue eyed and has a boyish-looking face, even at almost 42. I have always found boyish-looking men attractive.
In addition to finding H physically attractive, he was very attractive in other ways--intelligent, well-read, humorous, sensitive, none of which were qualities I saw in my father. He passed my litmus test with flying colors. Oh, and I was beyond impressed by the competence he displayed, at the age of 20, operating a small airplane. I never saw my father as competent, perhaps because my mother never did.
There was one thing they both had in common: smoking.
H mentioned here last fall that the very first thing I ever uttered to him included "get away from me." What I said was, "would you get away from me with that cigarette?!" I didn't even know him; we were both in the designated smoking area in the building; I was in a bad mood.
I am a highly sensitive person, which really means that my nervous system is more sensitive than the average person's. My sense of smell is extremely acute. All kinds of smells bother me, good and bad. For me, smells can be overwhelming, even sickening, literally. For an HSP, smoking would probably be a deal-breaker on a R, but I believe now that I overlooked it because H made me feel so safe. Safety was more important to me than anything else. Perhaps I was afraid that if I made an issue of it, he'd walk. I guess I just decided I had to deal with it.
I'll bet most people here understand the connection between smell and sex, the connection between all our senses and sex. I had no clue about this. I understand now that you can't have a complete sexual experience if you can't involve all of your senses in it. A lot of the time I have had to sort of disengage my nose.
This is hard for me to write because I don't want to hurt my H. Writing here has helped me to realize just how much I truly love him and how much I appreciate all that he has given me.
