On my way to D.C. to join my parents for a three-day weekend, something struck me that I think had not struck me in such brilliant clarity before. I was thinking about B____’s ex-fiancée and I realized as I hadn’t before that she had him and let him go. And I was boggled, momentarily blinded to the highway signs flitting past. She had met him, liked him, then loved him; she had become integrated with his family, slept with him, lived with him, and was asked to marry him. She was building a life with this glorious, flawed human being and just couldn’t make it work, couldn’t want it as much as I’m sure she wanted to want it.
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I never got the impression she was a bitch. Rather, they just came to the realization with reluctant inevitability that they just weren’t right for each other.
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And I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. She let him go? She had him square in her embrace and – what? – let him slip? Now, I am not exonerating B____ from responsibility in this. He has deep wounds that would have reared their ugly heads and interfered with any relationship he tried to have until he got them healed. And in the end, he wasn’t exactly clinging to her. But I can’t help but wonder – did she never look at him and see him with unscaled eyes, see his worth shining right out of his skin? Did it never occur to her to hold on and not let go, to see his flaws come out for the hundredth time, the thousandth time, and choose – make the choice, not float on the feeling – to focus her narrowed sights instead on his marvelous wealth of good qualities? Did she never think how worthy it would have been to believe instead in his potential, to view with level-headed simplicity all he could be, even if he wasn’t showing it right at that moment? How far could her stubbornness or vision have reached to have had him square in her life and let the tide ebb and slowly wash him out to sea?
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I cannot wrap my brain around it. He is a dazzling display of the best qualities that were instantly obvious to me from our first meeting, before I had ever fallen in love with him. And to have had such a man as is not found in this world look at you and say he wants to spend the whole of his life with you alone, only to come to the unimaginable conclusion that it’s not enough for you . . . it defies my comprehension.
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She had him. She was loved by him. And she let him go. Not as I did, because he left, but because she didn’t want him anymore. I am at a loss for words.
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But I suppose this is what I meant all those months ago when I was first facing the prospect of life without him and recognizing my own incurable helplessness before my love for him: the fact that he cannot warrant the worth I saw in him, his very words echoing his self-blindness – “No one has ever looked at me the way you look at me.” – simply proves, quietly and without fanfare, that I was the only one made for him. I was the only one given B____-sight which can see with unflinching clarity his shortcomings and still see the stronger light of his incomparable worth.
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I can’t hold it against her, his ex-fiancée, for not seeing his great value, for not seeing what a gem she had in a sea of cut glass.
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She couldn’t.
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She wasn’t me.
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