Last week I opened with my two favorite scenes from the movie Sense and Sensibility.  It always gets me when Elinor Dashwood tells Marianne, “at least you can be certain he (Willoughby) loved you.” and Marianne replies, “But not enough.  Not enough.”  Willoughby was Marianne’s Mr. Almost Right.  He loved her, but not enough.

In last week’s post, I started to tell the story of Fred, one of my Mr. Almost Rights.  I promised to share the rest of the story, namely the external details of what happened, this week.  Next week, I will share with you some of the internal details that went on inside of me with the hope that it will help you identify if you are with Mr. Almost Right.

Mr. Almost Right ~ Continued

“…Fred was telling all his friends about me, introducing me to them, calling me daily, spending lots of time with me, planning our future and doing all the things that a guy does when he is interested in a girl. Yes, words of love were spoken. It felt really almost right.  Almost…..”

After about eight months of dating, Fred’s military job transferred him instead to another state and so we were forced to date long-distance. We continued in our commitment to chastity. However, there came a point where he started asking me when I was going to move to this other state.  We were not married nor were we even engaged, yet he was pressuring me to move. It just was not something I was willing to do before marriage.

It was frustrating because Fred would propose to me on almost a daily basis and he was mailing me designs of ‘our’ new home asking me questions like, “Do you want a Hibachi grill in the kitchen?”  I was thinking (but never told him), “What?  How can I even begin to think about Hibachi grills when I don’t even know if we have a future?”  So, he was doing these things but he never asked my Father for my hand in marriage, he never presented me with an engagement ring nor would he suggest we set a wedding date with the church.

In his (lame) defense, he was going through intense military flight training and he kind of used that as an excuse for our delayed engagement.  I knew deep down that plenty of military guys were able to get engaged/married and go through flight training at the same time.  So, I felt like that was a flimsy reason to delay our engagement.  As Marianne stated in her reply about Willoughby, our engagement “was everyday implied but never declared.”

When I would ask him if he had checked into becoming Catholic, he would just start quizzing me about evolution and challenging me with Darwin-laced questions.  He was an intellectual doubter, God bless his soul.  In the end, we had an argument one night during a long-distant phone call which ended abruptly.  Things ended and we never spoke again.

People thought I was crazy and the “you’re too picky and stubborn” accusations were silently and sometimes verbally communicated.  I was thirty-two years old. They wondered, “What was wrong with him?” And, “Did I expect perfection?”  I am not sure what I expected but I knew what I had hoped for.  My heart hoped for marriage to a man who shares my Catholic faith and does not try to wrestle me into submission without first making the necessary sacrifices and commitment.

In this post from September 2012, I wrote the following:

“…Listen my sweet girls, when a man loves a woman, I mean really loves her, the location becomes a non-factor.  The guy just wants to be with his beloved.  He makes arrangements for them to be together.  He is accommodating to her wants and desires and longs for her happiness with him.  In short, he wants to marry her.  If temporary separation is required due to military assignments, school or a job, he leaves her with specific reassurance of his intentions for marriage with a timeline.  These are the actions of a man (really) in love…”

        And this post from October 2012:

“…As the girl, this will be the symptom to look out for:  you complain and/or act and feel frustrated.  Then, in response to your complaints and frustration, he pulls back instead of addressing your complaint in a way that will completely reassure you.  You see, even your Holy Spouse (the one that God intends for you to marry) will not be perfect in his wooing.  But, once a Holy Spouse realizes his mistake, he self-corrects and does things that will reassure his beloved.  Your Holy Spouse’s feelings for you should very rarely ebb. Rather, they flow and they grow.  Even if he does have a smidgen of doubt, he keeps it to himself in order not to lose you.”

Sacrifice, commitment, reassurance, certitude, timeline, marriage.

Do I believe that Fred loved me?  Yes.  But not enough.  Not enough.

“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. Or bends with the remover to remove. Oh no! It is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken”.

William Shakespeare Sonnet 116

Next Week:  What was going on with me internally during all this?

God love and bless you!

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