And PL Teen, we’ve disagreed on many topics it seems. You’re pretty sure the way the world works. To you most people are good. Perhaps they are. But all it takes is one or two really bad ones who blend in with the crowd until it’s too late to ruin your world. You are good at telling people they are wrong.
I know there are horrid people in the world. I know there are horrid things. But for the most part, on a day to day basis, I’ve encounter good people who smile back when you tell them hello, are generally helpful. And I know I tell people they’re wrong, if I agree I generally don’t bother to post as it’s been said. So it comes off as I disagree quite a lot.
And we all know at CAF what Biblical submission is. However, you can marry a man and agree to be submissive and find out he’s a wife-beater who has used Biblical submission as a cover for his own cruelty and lack of respect for women. You expect a woman who endured that to just forget that experience and the next guy who comes along waving a Bible gets a free pass because he might be nice? Would you also stand and judge such a woman who goes from one wife beating husband to the next and act like something is wrong with her? Damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t.
I never said blind trust from the start. And if I did, I take it back. Reasonable caution is reasonable. But the idea seems to be that people are holding past relationships against a whole gender, which doesn’t seem very fair.
Excalibur doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know that I once fell for the guy looking for an innocent young girl and waving poems and love songs and romantic restaurants in her face, promising all kinds of things. Turns out after the wedding he wasn’t what he seemed. He made the marriage a mockery, all the while insisting on his authority, by violence if necessary. Excalibur doesn’t know that women like me have had such men destroy their lives and their children’s lives. My respect for marriage is such I will never fall for that kind of man again. They don’t wear signs. You have to listen to the subtleties of what they say and how they say it. Yes, every man who comes along has to prove to me he isn’t another fake.
I am deeply sorry for what happened to you. No one deserves that, ever.
PL Teen, come back and pick at my words in another 20 years after you have run a home and raised children alone for a decade and a half. See if you can do it while hanging onto your faith and earning a living. Tell me how most people aren’t date rapists when you hear your teenage daughter tell you about the things her friends talk about after high school parties… waking up with their underwear missing and knowing they had been raped while they were passed out around “friends” they thought they could trust. Tell me in 20 years how most people are good.
My father walked from Krakow to Częstochowa, over three days, because he promised Mary he would if I got better when I was a sick premie at 24 weeks. He fasts every Friday for me. My boyfriend frequently stays up half the night talking to me, many times refusing to hang up if I’m in the middle of an OCD panic attack. When I was in London with him he also made sure I was alright, and gave into my petty demands about washing hands a hundred times. When the bus took off before I could get off and after he had already done so, he
ran after it. People that I meet on the street are generally nice. This does not mean I have not walked by a drunk guy who can barely stand, or never been spit on before, or had one of my best friends turn into someone I can’t even look at anymore.
But most people are good. Most people do not try to embody evil or nastiness or hatred. All people are Children of God, and a good deal know that.
I don’t plan to raise my children alone, I plan to raise them with the person I trust most, who knows everything about me, and who I know everything about. I plan to have a good Catholic household. I’ll be damned if my children are foolish enough to have moronic friends or go to shady parties. And God help the person who dares harm any of them.
I have had a good life, a very very blessed life. I am optimistic and cheerful and I like people. I forgive others because you are supposed to always forgive, and I try my best not to hold things against others, be it a past actions of their own which they have repented for, or an action of someone I know. My father is a true man of God, and my first and only boyfriend is my perfect match, my brother is my dear friend to me. Yes, I am a naive little ingenue who still believes in the good of others, and I very well like it that way.
Go in and work for the best.