Dear PearceHawk:

Thank you for your input!

Yes, I am only too aware of my struggles to control! I AM learning to release, to relax and let go. My life is not that bad at all, and I am really grateful for it, but at this stage I am trying to understand why things are the way they are. I HOPE later on to find out what I can do to improve them. The pursuit of happiness, you know 🙂

When you wrote that I had requirements for men, did you mean appearance, education, bank account…? Because this is NOT what I meant. The only time when I used that word, I used it ironically, looking for something in common that all the men I have been attracted to in the past have. Unavailability is one common feature, so I am trying to understand why it is so.

I may paint a picture of my ideal man, but if I look back at all those men I have ever felt attraction for, they were all different – tall and not tall at all, dark-haired and dark-eyed and red, some seven years older than me and thirty-five, lean and rather overweight, distinguished in their chosen career field and a waiter at a restaurant… So my “ideal” flies out of the window as soon as I meet somebody for whom I do feel attraction.

I fall for charm and charisma, and I am not sure at all that other women would fall for what I find in that particular man. Say, my mother did not understand why I would like this or that actor (for instance) when a teenager.

As for your question, I am not sure I can answer it.

You see, I have witnessed, read about (also in books by psychologists specializing in relationships between men and women) and experienced myself quite a few love stories, and I don’t believe that love is a choice. Trying to maintain the flame, not to let the “flower of love” die by watering it daily – that is a choice (if you call that “love”- fine), but the rest depends on something else – hormones, options, upbringing, examples – everything in a mix. If love were a choice, then why are there so many stories when one meets a good candidate, but can’t make oneself love him or her? Everything is there, but that spark – the spark (whatever you might call it) is missing. Or stories when somebody marries somebody simply because that other person is a “good man/woman” and then doesn’t know what to do with the marriage that feels stale, plain and “why did I marry him/her at all?” And that if the two are lucky and there is not a third person in the picture, the person who appeared BEFORE one of them realized that their marriage is no more. The instinct, the ancient part of the brain that we inherited from the long line of the evolution realized (hence s/he fell for that third person) that something in the union has gone awry, but the human brain has not yet processed it in full.

Yes, sometimes love develops later, but to bet one’s happiness on it (and worse, to hold the other person’s feelings hostage to it if the other person is in love) is not the way to go, in my opinion.

I don’t have any physical requirements at all.

In your situation, the smell of the person, the touch, the voice all would still be there, so yes, I believe that after the initial shock that his face is not quite as I imagined is gone, I would still love him.

It is another story if that love continues to our deathbeds…

X