Reflective

I have always liked breakup songs. This becomes a problem for a span of time after a breakup. As it has been about a month and a half since I broke up with Sarah, I am still in that place. I am listening to 'Slow Dancing in a Burning Room' by John Mayer right now. It is one of my favorites but it always seems to catapult me into a pensive melancholy mood. I know that it was the right decision to end the relationship with Sarah. Perhaps (as some of my friends say) it should have happened earlier.

I have certain ideas about what a long term relationship (I would say marriage but I am fairly turned off to the idea of that form of legal bondage at the moment) should be. I believe that the two should share interests and goals, that they should work together as a team to accomplish things and have experiences that neither would have alone. I see attraction and compatibility as being easily divided into three categories Physical, Emotional, and Intellectual.

The physical is the easiest to define, its that attraction that makes you want to bring your bodies together in an expression of the physicality that you each bring. This can be expressed as it most commonly is with sex, but that is merely the most obvious expression. Sports, hiking, skydiving, or whatever else you can do to connect with someone else is an expression of this physical attraction.

Emotional attraction is perhaps the hardest to define but yet somehow easy to understand. The person with whom you share an emotional bond is the person you call when you need someone to talk to, or perhaps only someone to listen. It is an important sense of connectedness to a person who you can trust to be there even if only so that you are not alone. Emotional attraction makes for friends that are important to you even if they are far away in body and mind. A person who is important to you even if they are not part of your daily life.

For me, the intellectual attraction may be the easiest to define because it is where I am most comfortable. I believe that I am at my core, an intellectual person. This is not to say that I think I am a genius. It means that I live my life with my head in control not my heart or my body. The intellectual attraction is a meeting of minds and a shared conversation or debate. This is the person you love to talk to and to reason with. Most friends, or at least most of my friends, fall into this category because it determines the things that I chose to do with my time. The people that I find mentally stimulating are the people that I want to see again, to talk to, and to meet across a gaming table. I often have long drawn-out debates with my father to the point that his wife and her children think that we are angry with each other, but that is the form of our mental connection to each other, to test and push each-others minds and share our own. With other friends it is a collaborative effort in creating something or a sharing of our separate fields of interest in a way that interests us both.

That being said Sarah and I had a fatal lack of connection on the intellectual front. Let me say here that I do not think that Sarah is dumb. She is smart and capable. The problem lies in the near complete lack of overlap between the things that she likes to put her mind to and the things I like to put my mind to. Sarah, as far as I can tell is centered in the physical. The marathons that I never managed to keep up with, the love of being outdoors, and the way she processes things make me think that perhaps we could never line up and be what I believe a couple should be.

The hard part comes when I think of the ways in which Sarah and I did connect. She delights me even now that we are apart. The quirky observations and the way she came at life with smiles and wonder. I start to ask myself if we were really good enough and maybe my ideas about connections and levels of attraction are all a bunch of overblown unrealistic bullshit. I start to wonder if I have made a huge mistake pushing away something that was good but not great.

I tried to open up the future for the both of us but at the cost of something that was very good at times. I believe in my head and somewhat in my heart that the split is best for both of us, and that is why I did it. I believe that we each can and will find someone who will be a better fit. But for the time being, I still have a place in my life that is vacant. Part of me wants to fill that space as soon as I can but the larger part, the careful thoughtful part knows that I would be a fool to rush ahead. I feel the absence and some piece of me wants that same person back even though there is no future for us in that relationship.

I hope that someday Sarah and I can be friends again but I fear that is not an option. The same reason that we could not be a couple may be the reason that we cannot be friends. We share very little. There would be no reason for us to see each other. The physical connection is blocked, the emotional connection is damaged, and the intellectual connection is terminally weak. With all of this in the way I don't see any kind of new relationship, even one of friendship that we can build together. Yet she was such a huge part of my life for so long that it seems insane that she no longer has any meaningful part to play.

I'm not sure what I want from her. Can I really be her friend? Am I just unwilling to completely sever the tie? or am I trying to find forgiveness for pushing her away?