[AnonymousBosch]

(02-07-2017 09:01 PM)Transsimian Wrote:  

I see nothing wrong with it.

A widow honouring her deceased partner isn't a bad thing.

I've stated many times before my belief that women have an unhealthy relationship with fantasy. Most of the miserable women I've met throughout my life have had one huge commonality: the inability to stop comparing what is to what if and assuming the fantasy possibility must be better. Rhyme or Reason started an interesting thread the other day on overcoming Cynicism, and came to the conclusion that people choose to be cynical. In this same way, most women simply choose to be dissatisfied by daydreaming.

With any long term relationship you enter, you will always be fighting what I think of as The Ghost of Possibility with regards to her first love: sometimes an innocent childhood sweetheart, but more often it'll be her first serious high school boyfriend. If she had 'hip' liberal parents, she was probably given birth control and praised for 'taking proactive control of her sexual choices'. What this means for guys: if he came in her, she's pair-bonded with him for life, and will always be wondering about him. He will be her big What If?

What if we stayed together?
What if we'd gotten married?
What if we'd had children together?

This sort of fantasy holds huge appeal to women. You'd be surprised how many marriages I've seen break up due to women hooking up with their high school flames on Facebook.

So, that's your Basic Bitch 'What If?' How could this hold an even greater appeal to the female sex? Add drama and tragedy.

What if my 'true' love hadn't died?

Death tends to blow away the dust of negative perceptions of people. Which means: He's now an idealised fantasy construct, forever wondered about, but impossible to obtain.

If you know women, you'll understand their innate fascinated attraction to such a construct, which is why Kerr is still thinking about some random high schooler even after catching and marrying one of the most sought-after males (Bloom) in the world. As such, I'm not surprised Kerr and Bloom's marriage failed.

Thinking about it, this most likely, explains the appeal of 'Twilight' to the Mommy set: it's a fantasy where their idealised high school boyfriend stays young and brooding forever.

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As an aside, I've long noted sex-related differences how death is handled in women's romantic fiction:

When a male character suffers the loss of his wife, the female fantasy is ostensibly about her meeting the widower and helping him to heal and move on. Scratch away that attractive veneer and the fantasy is much more viciously-female: it's a display of her superiority where she's beautiful and attractive enough that she has the power to make a man forget the dead. The dead wife usually features as an abstract conception of the impossible rival, and is kept off-stage.

However, when a female character suffers the loss of her husband, the fantasy is framed very differently. He's very much a main character in the piece. What most commonly seems to happen is the tale is about him teaching her to 'let go' of him, to move on and find 'the happiness she deserves' with another man. Often there's multiple superficially-attractive suitors on offer, but the real romance is the dead husband showing he loves her enough to wants her to be 'happy' again - and the abstract of attainable eternal 'happiness', not diamond, is a girl's best friend.

In this way, the Dead Husband is the Romantic Ideal here. His thoughts aren't upon, say, his death, his loss, damnation, grief or mourning, but purely-fixated upon her happiness.

This total disinterest in the man's wants and desires as being distinct and separate from her own doesn't surprise me in the slightest. It's just girls being girls. This is why, whenever you're deeply-lost in thought, a girl will naturally-assume you must be thinking about them.