Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about
re-bounding. Not in the basketball sense, but in the dating kind. Mostly it has
been on my mind, because a friend of mine mentioned in passing that as adults
in the dating world, essentially everyone we meet/ date is on the rebound. Could this really be true? I mean in some
sense or another, I guess all of us who are out there and looking, are doing
exactly that because we are not with someone else… it hasn’t worked out for us
at some point… but I don’t think that automatically makes every viable date, a
person on the rebound (I don’t consider myself to be on the re-bound…) I guess
it depends on your definition.
My friend suggested that being on the re-bound was more a
constant state of comparing and contrasting past relationships, and looking/
hoping for something better. (this was a guy friend, by the way) Personally, I thought this was sort of the cotton
candy, rose tinted, the glass is half full, optimistic view of the world
approach. The very word rebound means to spring back, or recoil… almost the
exact opposite of moving forward with hopeless abandon…
I’ve always viewed re-bounding as a way to channel your energy
from a past relationship. All that energy, all those thoughts, all that time
and effort that was once devoted to a relationship is suddenly just a stagnate
cloud, post breakup, and for me at least, the rebound is a way to re-direct… a
new obsession, a new channel, a new distraction. A palate cleanser, if you will…
I think Elizabeth Gilbert describes it
really well in Eat, Pray, Love when she says “I dove out of my marriage and
into David’s arms exactly the same way a cartoon circus performer dives off a
high platform and into a small cut of water, vanishing completely. I clung to
David for escape form marriage as if he were the last helicopter pulling out of
Saigon. I inflicted upon him my every hope for my salvation and happiness.”(
Eat, Pray, Love, pg 18) Ok so this is maybe a little extreme… but it really seems
to capture the diversionary view of being on the re-bound. But to some extent I
also think that being on the rebound is a little bit of that optimistic note…
of at least being open to the idea of someone else.
That being said… I know there are various definitions, and
various situations. I know several people who are in long term, committed
relationships with the re-bound guy…. People who have married the re-bound guy… (good
for them I say!) and of course I love to cling to the ever present notion that
love will happen when you are least expecting it… IE sometimes just out of a
relationship when your emotions are still so raw and you are trying to climb
out of the aftermath. I’m not saying I’ve experienced that, but I believe it
can happen.
Of course you could also end up in that murky place where
you completely close yourself off, and you make yourself unavailable
emotionally… The walls go up, the armor goes on… and hell, we’ve all been there…
stuck in the wallowing (let’s face it… sometimes we don’t want to get over it) but
then we also run the risk of completely missing out on something great… even if
the timing isn’t. I’m not applying this
is any specific situations or instances… but I was thinking along these lines
as I was out harvesting my garden earlier this evening. I have these sun-gold tomatoes that are
pretty much taking over my world right now. I’ve sort of let them go, and they
are rambling and overwhelming most of the other large plants in my garden right
now. I pick a few as I water, but the idea of them was sort of overwhelming…. Until
tonight I finally had some dedicated garden time, and I went out for a serious
harvest. And underneath the rambling sun-golds I found two black krim tomatoes,
and twenty green zebras. This is the part where I make a cheesy garden metaphor
and compare dating and rebounding to tomatoes… get ready. But really, I was so overwhelmed by the
sun-golds… they were pretty much consuming everything, and then when I actually
stopped to weed through them, I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. I think dating is a lot like that… Once you
weed through all the pre-existing emotional baggage that we all carry around, I
think it is really easy to be pleasantly surprised by what you weren’t
expecting to find. Sassy, striped, chartreuse tomatoes.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this… maybe we
really are all just rambling around on the re-bound. Or maybe we are all just
optimistic… or maybe we are all just naive. Maybe we are all just floating
around in a state between “looking for a distraction” and “looking for someone”…
and in every situation you kind of have to hope that you end up being the “someone”,
and not just the distraction. But I’m hoping that in any situation, I get to be
the sassy, unexpected tomato.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment