The Wrong Reasons to Dump a Person

There are a few quotes that come to mind when I read the title:

"If you have someone with a good soul and they care about you, you should hold onto them like the grip of death. You know what happens to women who dump good men? They end up with endless subscriptions to Match.com and Eharmony gripping happy pills."

"If you look back on the time when you first met, first started to get to know each other, and still smile, there is a reason to continue loving."

I'm bad at remembering details, so those quotes weren't verbatim, but they convey a basic point. Summed up well in a Pussy Cat Dolls song, "No body's gonna love me better, I'mastickwitchu forever."

LOL. Ok I'll stop w/ the bad song lyrics, random quotes, and strange title and get to the point.

I recently caught up with a friend I hadn't talked to in quite a while. As is what happens with girlfriends, we got on the topic of relationships. She told me about her current situation, I told her about mine. One thing about my situation made her concerned. I expressed to her my concern about my bf's path to his destination. He wants to run his own business, he wants to give back to his country and all that jazz, but he never seems to have a solid plan as to how he's going to accomplish these things. Or better, he has a plan, but he doesn't think it all the way through which causes him to scrap plans time and time again. For example, giving back to his country. My bf for a while wanted to join the Marines. Well that was a fun 6 months of arguing back and forth about the value of doing such a thing, especially at a time of WAR; and not just any war, a badly run war. Finally his dad talked him out of it using practicality - If you want to be around to do the things you want to do in life, joining the Marines may not be your best option. My bf never wanted a career out of the military, just some experience doing something "difficult." But for some reason it took him 6 months to realize the extremity of joining the Marines. But he still wants to give back so he's joining the Army National Guard. The one reason why I don't argue with him over this is that he is going through the officer program, which takes 2 years, and he's going into the engineering sector. So as one of his friends told him, he'll probably help build a fence in on the US-Mexico border. I don't know where the war is going, but hopefully in 2 years they won't be misusing the National Guard as much as they are now.

So he's got that goal planned out finally, leaving the whole running his own business goal to be accomplished. The problem with the business goal is that here too, he does not have a solid plan, just a destination. One week he wants to go to business school, the next week its law school, the next its, "Screw grad school! I can do it on my own." For whatever reason, his indecision makes me nervous. Especially since I love having plans. Sure I scrap them every now and again, but having a solid plan on how I'm going to get somewhere puts me at ease.

My friend picked up on this and gave me the following advice: "Do you want an old beat up Victorian that you can remodel or do you want a new modern home? The right package is out there, you don't have to work on a guy and hope it'll all work out in the end. You especially don't want to spend all of your 20's on one guy and regret it. You're at a school with a lot of options, you should date around."

I appreciated my friend's advice. She is older than me and has more experience in the dating world.. so for a day or two I thought about her advice. And I've ultimately decided that, for me at least, it doesn't make much sense.

We all have our faults. I may be going to med school but I'm not the "warmest" person of them all. I can be condescending and/or negative. I don't know a lot of things about life and in many respects I'm still really naive. I can be really judgemental or narrow minded. I can't cook, and I get sick a lot. There are probably a lot of things about me that someone would have to see as a trade-off. E.g. I wanted a stay at home mom who cooks brilliantly but instead I got a workaholic doctor who can't boil water.

The point being that, my bf isn't perfect and neither am I. And for the most part, I don't believe there are perfect packages out there that contain EVERYTHING you want. Maybe I could find a guy with such a great plan he started running his own business at 25 instead of 35. But maybe that guy wouldn't love me as much or wouldn't put up with my dog, or wouldn't be genuine or generous, or wouldn't have a backbone, or wouldn't want to make me happy.. The list goes on. To me, it seems that to gain some things, you may have to lose something else.

So I've concluded that, instead of doubting my bf so much, I should just be supportive for the most part and point out weaknesses in a plan, not to get him to scrap them, but to get him to think hard about how he wants to achieve a goal. And if we ultimately end up together great, and if not, there is something to be said about just living for the moment and enjoying what you have today.

And back to the title of the post, I can't dump someone because they are not my perfect vision. My bf's got 90% of what I want and to dump him now in hopes of finding 95%, or 100% just seems retarded since most men probably are at 25% i.e. "well, he's male." I've heard too many stories of women dumping or being dumped by guys only to spend most of their time looking for that same type of guy again. No thanks. People break up all the time for one reason or another, but I'd rather it be an extremely legitimate one - e.g. he doesn't want to marry me - rather than a minor one.

Also, if we grow old together, maybe we'll both reach the 100% level for each other.