Friends, Lovers, and Spouses...

I recently had a conversation with a friend about people we know who go back to the people in their lives who hurt them. The list below is made up of of the usual suspects.

Ex-boyfriends.

Ex-girlfriends.

Ex-wives.

Ex-husbands.

Ex-friends.

Ex-Ex-Ex's.


From the outside looking in we tend to think of this as lunacy. Why go back to the one who caused the pain that drove you away to begin with?

Many times people go back to the people who stopped calling back, who cheated, who used them, who took their youth, who stole their innocence, who owe them money, or who just down right treated them like a low down dirty dog.  

Sure there are numerous pschological reasons behind this. Freud would have blamed your mother.

But allow me throw another idea out there. We don't run back to those who hurt us or used us or ignored us because of some deep rooted need to be accepted by those who become indifferent toward us. We run back because, sadly, that's our circle of friends.

We chose most of our friends, lovers, and spouses not on anything truly deep, but because of geographical limitations. It's hard to go to the movies with a friend who lives in Texas while you live in Southern California. 

So we have a group that gets presented before us based on a few random choices. 

We select our friends, lovers, and spouses because they live in or near our city, because they go to our church, work in our office, joined the local book club, or went to our high school or college. You find at least one thing you have in common and the relationship blasts off or putters. 

Maybe the one thing that started that relationship was the sharing of a similiar interest. 

Music.

Baseball.

God.

Seinfeld.

Working Out.

...or for those who are honest...sex. You just wanted to hook up and they left you out to hang on a limb. 

But at the heart of most of this is just simply the idea that they are close by and do the things mentioned above. So you toss aside your heart. You abandon logic. You kiss reason goodbye. You just settle for a person because they are "here" as opposed to whoever is out "there."

In reality, your best friend or future spouse lives 300 miles away, and you just haven't met them yet. But because we live in a TV World, we assume that the only people ment for me are the ones thrusted before me. In the world of TV, characters are friends because of those factors listed above.

They aren't friends because of values.

They aren't friends because of the deep conversations they share.

They are friends because the script calls for them to be. 

But life is not a TV show. We don't have to go back to those who hurt us because they are in our circle of friends and lovers. 

Instead of looking simply at the world in front of you, why not look at the world around you?