There are those relationships ...
.... that should only ever be confined to university years, and with some universities and cities, they are. People tend not to hang around in Norwich, Exeter, St Andrews, Durham &c so after a few months of heartfelt and failing long distance post-graduation efforts, the boy-girl thing falls apart.

This is not the case in a city where more people hang around. By the time you do some early 20s dossing about, have a job, leave it, she does voluntary work, then one of you finally makes a move somewhere else, it's quite possible that you've been together for - let's say - 5 or 6 years. At that point you might still only be 24 or 25, but a relationship of that longevity feels pretty serious, so you reckon you can't give it up just because of *distance* surely? So over the course of an academic year - in different cities - you try to keep it going ... you sleep with someone else, she sleeps with someone else, all the signs are there (in 20/20 hindsight) that it's time to call it a day, but the sheer gravity of the previous years pulls you back ... Finally you make a decision to live together, try hard to a few months, and it fails horribly. After 7 years together, you give up, split up, and go live in separate places...

On the bright side, you're young. There's a 20something resilience at work. Within a few months, there's a new woman around. She's cute, smart, interesting, ideal. It's all going really well then you do something rather dumb. In a "one last trip" trip to go and collect your stuff from where you used to live with the ex, both you and she make the egregious error of sleeping with each other "one last time".

You even confess to the new woman and she grits her teeth, unhappily, and reckons, "Oh well, they'll never see each other again..." Yeah ...

Couple of months later, a letter arrives, out of the blue, from the now distant ex. Would it, er, at be possible, sort of, to try again? Sophie's choice but without the dead kid ...

So do you

1. Go back to the former love of your young life, the woman you thought you'd be with forever OR

2. Blow her out and stick with the bright shiny new woman?

Gravity pulls. You dump the new girl and try again with the old one. It starts well, it even lasts for a while happily; as much as two or three years. But then you settle, both have jobs, buy a flat, and things start to sour. She hates the city, she wants to have kids and work part time, or not at all. You're a city living freelance with no security of income. After a watershed year of terrible trauma involving bereavement, illness and depression, she dumps you for a new life. Oh crappy crappy crap crap.

Over time, you pick yourself up. Things improve. Women even start to look at you again. More than 3 years after the big split, and the odd liaison notwithstanding, you fall HORRIBLY in love with a married woman at work. Her marriage is up shit creek. She likes you. You like her. You fend off the inevitable but eventually you sleep with her; not a "bit on the side" scenario, but a view to the future where her failing marriage will end and you and she shall be together. Permanently.

One autumn day she packs her bags and leaves her husband. She sits in a friend's house for a few hours, deliberating. Then gravity draws her back to the man she'd married something like ten years previously. She tells you this the next day. She says she can't see you anymore, but you were thinking that as well - not a bit on the side remember but an aspiration of having a future together, now blown away.

Karma? You dumped the bright shiny new girl way back in early '90 ... the married one dumped you in '00 ... gravity won in both cases and karma was squared.

Length? Don't read the fucking thing then.
( writerblock ... embedding disabled by request on, Fri 22 Feb 2008, 20:14, 1 reply)

Ow
You make life sound worth living :P
( whenanimalsattackhumans clad in global hypercolour, Fri 22 Feb 2008, 23:35, closed)