Toad Kissing
Life was good or bad depending on where you were in the game.
I have always wondered about other people's relationships because I felt mine was such a lost cause. Somewhere in here, I talk about reading Harlequins by the bushel basket. Growing up I thought, people met, fell in love, and got married. That was it. Of course there was always the "other" someone who didn't want the lady in the store to end up with that guy and all those other little nuances of storybook romance. In those days there wasn't much talk about what happened after you got married. Unless it was a marriage of convenience the story ended at the alter.
Of course, growing up, we'd seen other married people but we never saw people who really seemed to like each other while at the same time being married. There must have been some who did but we, or at least I, never saw them.
I would read about first kisses and the excitement and passion of falling in love. It was years before I even had a first kiss. I don't even remember it. That's how memorable it was.
When I met Tom, I had not experienced many kisses and for sure none of note. His kisses were not exciting to me. I took that as, because I wasn't in love with him. I'm pretty sure you can "love" someone with out being "in love" with them. I'm really not sure that any type of "love" lasts forever. I think in the beginning I must have felt something for him. Maybe I was "in like" with him?
I never really liked kissing anyone back then. I did say I was naive back there somewhere in these pages. I'd always heard you had to kiss a lot of toads before you found your prince and I believe I got all the toads.
After we were married I was still reading books. I'd read them for years but now my tastes changed. I read some "adult" books. I didn't find them more informative about love so I stopped reading them. I came to the conclusion that love was a fantasy. Oh, I'm sure there are lots of people who will disagree with me but this is what I felt then. If love existed, I'd never have it.
When I married Tom there was no excitement. I felt a fondness for him or at least for the man I thought he was then. I liked some guys. I just never in those days found one who made me tingle.
I don't know how it happened but people, mostly women but occasionally men would ask me for advice on their relationships or just tell me their troubles. If I had no clue what to tell them, I visited the library and read another book. I was in to nonfiction now or still fiction depending on your viewpoint.
Girls on the glue line asked me stuff even though I told them I knew nothing.
In Ohio it was no different. People still asked me for advice. Why on earth they thought I would know the answers is beyond me.
One young fellow asked me if he could be gay. This was a subject I really knew nothing about. I got him to talk about his feelings. I asked him point blank how he would feel about kissing a guy. His face told it all. He said something like "icky." I told him to relax, he wasn't gay. What he was, was overly protected all of his life by a granny who knew next to nothing about raising a young boy.
Another young man came to me one day and asked me what he could do about his wife. It seemed she was very aggressive and would get angry and hit him with things. I had no answers for that one. I told him he had to access the relationship to see if it was worth fixing and if it was possible. I think he stuck with her but I'm not sure.
I'm going to tell you about Toby on the next page. Toby was one of the most mixed up characters I knew.