By Any Other Name
I hope you can find the time to seriously consider my problem. I was debating not mentioning my age because you may think, she's just a kid. Maybe so, but I'm going through the same thing adults are.
I am 16. I've always been a strong believer in God and abstinence. I've always had the loud voice of conscience in my head. I get good grades, and I've always believed there is no such thing as love in high school.
Things are different now. I met this guy, a "redneck." I never felt a sense of belonging as strong as the one I feel when I'm with him. We met awhile ago at a nearby river, then he returned to his home in another city. Later I heard someone in a big black truck was stopping by, but I was never home to see who it was.
One day I was home. The truck pulled up, and he asked me to go fishing with him. I won't go into huge details, but I had a lot of fun and a couple of beers. Neither of us wanted the label of boyfriend and girlfriend so we didn't use it. He has taken something from me that I cannot take back, however I don't regret the decision I made.
He may be coming back in a few months, but he will for sure when he graduates in December and works as a mechanic. He is 17; he wants kids when he is 18 or 19. I am a very grounded person. Family and schooling are important to me, but I would consider moving in with him and not going to college.
I don't need someone to sound like my mom and preach to me. I need someone to step into my shoes and understand what I am thinking and feeling. I think I love him. I don't know for sure he feels the same way. He doesn't like opening up much, and even if he did, how will I know it's the truth?
He's not perfect. I have forgiven him way too many times for things as small as not calling when he said he would, to things as big as full-blown cheating. But really is it cheating without the label? I need some good advice. I hope you're up to this one.
Haley
Haley, when Benjamin Franklin was 17, he sailed from Boston to Philadelphia. His passage didn't include meals so Ben, a vegetarian, brought his own provisions. When the ship became becalmed, everyone ran out of food. Other passengers threw a line over the side and caught cod.
Ben's vegetarian morals prevented him from eating fish, but his hunger drew him to the side of a cook gutting a cod. Inside the cod were smaller fish. Ben changed his mind. If you can eat one another, he reasoned, then I can eat you. Later Ben observed how convenient a faculty reason is, since it enables us to make or find a reason for anything we have a mind to do.
Husband and wife, mother and child, best friends, and neighbors are all established relationships. You are having sex with a young man who doesn't even call you his girlfriend. How would you label that?
You've found a reason to give up college for a man you cannot trust. Perhaps you think he's good-looking, or you think bad boys are hot, or you don't think you deserve better. His justification may be something you can't even imagine. He could think she's not my girlfriend so I don't owe her anything, not even respect.
Many women desire to make any man they are intimate with "the one," in spite of all evidence to the contrary. It is a pattern which repeats itself again and again. Ben Franklin's reason for discarding his beliefs was hunger. What's yours?
Wayne & Tamara
(From the column for the week of March 28, 2005)
Wishing And Hoping
I am your classic good guy, the good guy who never wins. My girlfriend of two months broke up with me today. She says she is not over her ex-boyfriend, who she broke up with four months ago. They were together a year and a half.
While they were together, he had sex with two other girls. He was a thug, and she admitted he was not the kind of guy she wanted at all. With him she had to lie to her parents, but her parents love me and extended her curfew while we were together.
My first question is why do girls always go for the bad guys, the ones who break their hearts? Then they find a good guy, break his heart, and go back to the bad guy. My second question is what can a guy do to make a girl realize she is making a mistake and about to get her heart broken again?
Buzz
Buzz, her ex-boyfriend wasn’t interested in a relationship, but in scoring. With two other girls that was his goal, and that was his goal with your girlfriend as well. Whether it was his looks, his lines, or his lies, he took something from her. He changed her.
Your girlfriend, like a person swindled by a con man, is afraid to admit what happened. In her mind, if she can get him back, she was not swindled and not conned. She wants to change being used into being loved.
Her actions are based on the past, a past you cannot alter. She is who she is right now. We must accept people as they are. We can’t pin our hopes on who they may be in the future. It doesn’t matter if she is right or wrong, right now she wants someone else. That is the truth, and that is what you need to accept.
Tamara
(From the column for the week of April 10, 2000)
