After the grocery store run-in with Swedish Fish, I turned on my phone one morning to find six calls from two numbers I didn’t recognize. And four voice messages.
I was surprised, to say the least, to hear the voice in those messages. The second ghost of relationships past came to haunt me. The messages were from a guy I met on a business trip three years ago. The sum total of our time together was one lunch and two dinners. We shared one (not particularly remarkable) kiss.
It never got off the ground because of 4,500 miles between us. I met him while traveling. We talked, laughed, had a few dates, I left, we emailed and called, I saw it as an impossible situation, he pushed for more, I smelled a rat, he started talking marriage, I smelled a green card scam, and I said, “Easy there, one step at a time. We had three dates and one kiss and you’re talking marriage?!” he got angry, said some horrible things to me, called me some awful, foul things, I blocked his email address and phone number, heaved a sigh of relief thinking I dodged a bullet with that creep, and forgot about him.
And now three years later, from a bar, so drunk I could barely understand what he was saying, he wants me to forgive him. I’m the only woman he’s ever truly cared about, apparently. Wow. I still smell the green card scam. Too many things in this guy’s story didn’t add up—I felt it then, and I felt it again with the four voice mails.
Where Swedish Fish held pain in his eyes, this guy held bullshit in his drunken voice. Forgive him? Forgive him for what? For calling me the most foul, degrading, insulting names I’ve ever been called? Forgive him for trying to use me for immigration purposes? Don’t think so.
Forgiveness is a gift of ourselves. Drunk Dial Boy is not getting a gift from me. Forgiveness is not an excuse for stupidity. How many times have we heard abused women say they forgive their battering husband and see them beaten time and time again? How many times have we seen people get passed over for well deserved promotions because they’re the nice one who always forgives the boss who says, “Not in the budget this year?”
It’s okay to be stingy with forgiveness. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not about deserving forgiveness. Deserving implies deciding on forgiveness worthiness. To discern worthiness you have to judge. I don’t want to judge. Forgiveness is a gift—a gift free of attachments and strings and judgment. But like other gifts we give of ourselves, we have to be careful not to give away too much. We carefully give love, anger, time, and talent. Forgiveness is the same. It’s not about judging; it’s about sensing when it’s right, when it’s appropriate.
The perfect holiday trifecta of forgiveness lessons would be if the third ghost of relationships past came to haunt me.
Since the Drunk Dial Boy reappeared, I’ve been a little jumpy. Two unexpected, out of the blue run-ins with former beaus in one week? A bit odd; a bit of a coincidence. Who next? I wonder. I keep telling myself not to answer that question. I don’t have a lot of skeletons in my dating closet, but the few hanging in there are best left kept shoved in the dusty, dark back corner to rot.
I thought about A Christmas Carol and the ghosts of Christmas. I’m not sure I’m ready or able to handle a visit from the ghost of relationships future. If my past dating life offers any insight into the future, it’s scary to say the least. Then I thought about forgiveness. Of the men I’ve dated, there’s only really one hornet’s nest of forgiveness emotion.
