Here's my Hillbilly again, getting serious this time with some good advice.
I guess that if I was going to give this blog post a title, though it is really not the main theme, it would be the question – what could have been?
The other day, I was thinking about back when I was young, single, and still dating. Like most, I had my first love, (puppy love), and first broken heart! With that, I grew wiser and leery of having a steady girlfriend. In fact, I began just dating this one and that one without getting too serious with anyone.
During that time, at a church revival that was advertised as a young people’s meeting, we had a lot of young people come in from over a fairly large area of Missouri. Due to that, I met and spent some time with a young woman, a few years my junior. She was cute, sweet, funny, and had the biggest dimples I ever saw. She got my attention, and --- I got her phone number, address, etc. Being a young, romantic hillbilly, a couple of weeks later, I made her a paper that looked like a check and made it payable to her for 10,000 kisses. Hey, don’t laugh too hard! It worked! It led to some dates and a lot of kisses! In fact almost immediately, we were being drawn together.
So what happened? Well, since we lived quite a distance apart, we were not getting to see each other every day or even every week. The last day we got to see each other on a planned date, she was distant and didn’t act like she was enjoying being with me. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. So, I decided that she was no longer interested in me. I moved on!
A few months later, I began dating another girl. We were just beginning to get somewhat serious, when another congregation had a young people’s meeting. We attended. I had warned my girlfriend that we might run into a couple of girls there that I had dated previously. We did! They got together and sat right in front of us.
Then next day, my girlfriend had to work but I went back down to help out with the services. Afterwards, the girl with the 10,000 kiss check wanted to talk. We did so for about an hour. Basically, she wanted to know what had happened to us. I told her that after how our last date had gone, I had decided she had found someone else or just didn’t want to be around me anymore.
She then went on to tell me that she had just been upset, because her mother and stepdad had been arguing and it had looked as if they were going to separate. We went on to talk in what I can only say was a friendly but poignant conversation for both of us. After that weekend, I never saw her again.
When you look at what went wrong between us, it is what goes wrong with so many relationships --- the failure to communicate. If she had let me know what she was going through, I would have understood and tried to console her, let her talk, or whatever she needed. As it was, she held it in and gave me no chance. I then took her attitude as rejection.
Communication problems or poor communication cause huge problems in every facet of our lives. In marriage, business, etc. Good communication is so very important.
Recently, Cynthia spoke of her problem with depression. Imagine what it could be like, in our marriage, if I wasn’t aware. What if she was hiding what she was going through and I thought any problems we had were due to her lack of feelings for me? What if she was going through these things and felt that I was uncaring?
Obviously, problems could occur. I have seen couples divorce that I would have thought would have been the last to have problems. On the other hand, I know a couple, that if I had been a betting man, I would have bet you that their marriage wouldn’t have lasted 5 years! They were both ridiculously hot tempered and stubborn. But they have been married for around 34 years now.
One of the steps they have taken in their marriage, is that once a month, they have a night planned where they sit down and have a serious discussion about anything or things that the other one might be doing or not doing that is bothering them. They converse. They let each other know their feelings.
There might be a lesson there for us all. In a time where everyone is always texting one another, talking to each other on facebook, etc., maybe we as couples need to just sit down and have an old time, heart to heart conversation.
From the Hillbilly’s Corner!
My Hillbilly is my best friend, so it's easy to share my feelings with him. Have you known couples that split because they failed to communicate?
