Post 40: Ecology and Loneliness

Originally created as Column Forty, January, 2005

I’m starting to think that all my single friends whether they are never married, widowed, divorced with children or divorced without don’t REALLY want to meet someone new…not deep down in their subconscious. On the one hand, we want to feel excitement, butterflies in their stomach, something different, new, explore and conquer the unknown….

But on the other hand we want the familiarity of people who have known them from 1-30 years, friends, people who have been with them through rough and better times, the familiarity of a hug or a smile or a certain joke, the ability to tease and yet being able to forgive…in short, everything that comes with being a friend….

And forever reason the “comfort’ of the “chevreh” (group of friends) is like the hug of a mother to a child…no replacement for it. And although sex has sometimes come into place with some of the chevreh, being that the “chevreh” consists of certain people who may or may not have slept with each other at some point within the last 1-20 years, it is not the main factor.

So you get together, some hormones rage, some don’t. “Hey Odelia, are you going back to Holon? My friend Dana lives there and it would be great if you could give her a lift back – otherwise I have to drive out of my way”, I said at a gathering of friends and friends of friends on a cold and rainy Saturday night approximately 30 kilometers away from Tel Aviv…”I haven’t decided if I’m going home” replied Odelia. (Odelia obviously did not have a young child or babysitter waiting for her to come home to Tel Aviv).

Ah, I understand later as I see her lurking next to the car of my ex boyfriend…later I find out she did go back to Tel Aviv – my ex boyfriend wanted her to stay over in the city where he lives. So he was rejected….he’s hard to resist…surprised that she rejected him…he didn’t even look me in the eye, but that was ok….I’ve moved on…maybe not….and so I dropped Dana off in Tel Aviv and went home alone but then get a call to see if I got home ok and then invited the caller over…it was a cold and rainy night. The caller wasn’t my recent ex boyfriend but there were endless possibilities of who would end up with whom that evening.

This writer asks why accept a hug from a stranger when you can recycle?