on the horns of a dilemma

Sarah has been discussing her two-man dilemma with me of late. (I could have called it a two-horned dilemma, bwah ha ha, but this isn’t that kind of blog. Okay, I’ll put it in the title.) She had a new lover – perhaps she met him about 3 or 4 weeks ago. Let’s call him M. They got along fabulously well and she was in that delirious in-love stage for a while. Then it suddenly went a bit sour as that particular delirium is wont to do. She had an event of emotional turmoil that he was involved with and he became uncontactable.

Whenever she spoke to him she gave him a piece of her mind about how he could desert her in her hour of need and, as soon as he could, he ran away again.

Early in this uncontactable stage, she met a new man whom we shall call H. He is a capricorn as is she and I and her dad. Both my daughters are total astrology freaks at the moment so everyone is categorised according to their star sign (and moon sign and ascendant and any number of other things).

Apparently capricorns can go 2 ways. There is hardship somewhere early in life and then we become extremely empathetic, humane and warm because we understand what it is like, or we can choose bitterness, resentment and a give-up approach. Well H is the latter kind of capricorn but Sarah totally understood where he was coming from and crept under his armour every time. He fell in love, needless to say, and she was a bit besotted too – I can’t remember why. He wanted to know if she was single and she said actually I don’t know at the moment. I’ll have to get back to you.

Me, I was a campaigner for non-monogamy in my promiscuous days. I wouldn’t have had to choose between the two. They would have had to choose whether to share their hussy or run away. But that’s a story for another day.

The love affaire with M has been on and off a few times. He gets back into Sarah’s good books and then disappears off the radar again. But it’s the same with H. He goes off to the country for 5 days to visit his mum and his phone is out of range. Or he goes to stay at a friend’s in Geelong and leaves his phone at home.

‘I don’t care what they want to do,’ she tells me, ‘But I don’t want to try and have a relationship with them if I can never contact them. I want to find someone else if that’s how it is with them. How do I keep attracting this kind of man?’

‘I have a theory about that,’ I say, and naturally she is all ears. ‘It’s not that this is what they are inevitably like, it’s that this is how they are being for you at the moment. You are trying to get that no man can nurse you through a traumatic time better than you can do it for yourself. The longer you try to force a man to make you feel better, the longer you will have unavailable men in your life. Once you get it, they’ll be falling over themselves.’ Just my little prediction.

She liked it. She left lighter than she arrived, even if she didn’t think she was quite ready to ‘get it’ yet.