So, I have been in town lately (the past 2 months) getting things figured out and whilst doing this I have had a lot of time to talk to people and reflect. I was recently talking to someone who knows an ex-girlfriend of mine (though, only in passing) and this friend(and I use this term very loosely) being perceptive pointed out that my ex was incredibly book smart and had a smoking body (both undeniable) but just seemed vapid and hollow when it came to everything else in life.
At first I vehemently disagreed (though I had been told this by other people) and then I thought, maybe, just maybe, they were right. One always expects people to progress but what if, by an off chance people regress. Not all people, just some. Alright, most. This of course is obvious. Those who we looked at four years ago and said “he (or she) is destined for great things” and those who looked like failure was just around the corner, seemed to have done quite well for themselves. Who would have thought that 4 years later I would be doing critical care medicine and studying economics at a top US university? Sure as hell not me or any of my friends.
This conversation with a friend also got me thinking how we interpret people. How we chose to view them. At funerals, the dead person always looks like a saint. Could my ex really be all that good? Could she be the person I remember her being? Did she change or did I simply never see something? Or maybe I saw something no one else did. Often with ex girlfriends its tough to get an accurate answer. Either you don’t talk to each other anymore or everyone has taken sides and no one can objectively tell you about the other person. I think we often we cling to a past memory of a person or put them on some sort of pedestal, only later realizing that the pedestal never gave you a clear view of the person(up their skirt?). Like that boy at summer camp (not in my case, I never went to summer camp and never had crush on a boy) who you first fell in love with and fantasized all about your freshman year of high school, only to find out the following summer that really, he wasn’t all that cool. But you spent all year infatuated with the concept of him of him and not really him.
I can’t say all of these years later I was ever infatuated with any ex-girlfriend, only that I thought of them as special. They had something that no one else did. Was I wrong the whole time? Or did they just lose “it”?
