Truth Uncovered

“I was popular with girls when I was your age,” I often said to my boys, thus making fun of their lack of sugar & spice in their otherwise pretty colorful lives. Albeit they had great difficulty believing the validity of my claim, they had greater difficulty thinking that their honest father was a liar; therefore they continued to accept my statement begrudgingly until one day I slipped a little bit and the truth was revealed.

“I had a couple of dates with a beautiful bus conductor when I was in the service, but she dumped me after that,” I said to William.

“O yeah, she dumped you?” William sensed an opportunity to uncover the truthfulness of my boast in the past.

“No big deal. She left because her brother didn’t like me.” I tried to patch up the hole that I had poked with an alibi.

“Her brother? I can’t believe that,” he continued to taunt and I became speechless. I guess I really wasn’t all that popular with the opposite sex. I was fortunate to have a few dates in my twenties, not because I was that eligible, I was merely not all that selective.

I didn’t mean to insult my children or make fun of them for not having girlfriends. As a matter of fact, I admire them for not chasing whomever happens to come along. I was mentally unhealthy as a young man and the feeling of inferiority caused me to search for someone to compensate for my dreadful inadequacy. I felt so incomplete then that I seemed to always need a girl to complete my being. That was the sole reason that I always needed someone by my side. To a certain extent, I was a fearful little boy and the few girlfriends I have had were my security blankets.

We need to be happy with ourselves before we can make other people happy. Those who seek a significant other to make their lives more fulfilled or joyful will be sorely disappointed, and the relationship that they end up having will eventually become too suffocating to bear. The ones who are miserable being single will become doubly miserable being coupled. “Two are better than one,” says Ecclesiastes, but the sum total of two people’s problems are obviously greater than just one person’s difficulties and are much tougher to handle. We should be more prepared to be someone’s spouse so that we will bring less baggage into our marital relationship, and not having random dates and casual relationships is a good start.