So, I'm telling myself that Lidia is moving on with her life and that I need to do the same. I am just feeling some fear right now about meeting anyone as nice and nurturing as she was and I'm also scared about latching on to the first nice woman I meet. I need to try and just relax and see this as an opportunity to meet new friends and not as a search for my next ex-girlfriend.

I joined an on-line support group yesterday. We exchange emails as a way of talking out our issues. Most of my new friends were dumped by their boyfriend/girlfriend so I bring a completely different take on the whole thing. One thing I've seen right off is that most of these people are still in pretty close contact with their exes. I can totally see how that makes going through a break up so much harder and it's added to my resolve to not contact Lidia at all, even though it's still very difficult and I continue to seriously miss her.

I was thinking about how it would be if we started dating again. It would be just as if we were still together. We would probably go out to dinner and a movie just like we always did. That was the main thing we enjoyed together. There isn't anything wrong with that but it just shows that we don't have much in common that would let us have a happy marriage.

I was watching an interesting show on PBS last night. It was a guide to philosophy. I had no idea that Schopenhauer was considered "Dr. Love" and wrote the first serious treatise on Love. I know that the show was trying to be consoling but they basically reduced love down to the biological urge to procreate. "The Will to Life."

There was one thing that did strike me as interesting. That being in love and being happy are 2 emotional states that aren't necessarily related. At the end of the show the host talks about why relationships can end. It's not because there's really anything "wrong" with you it's that the biological urge has been replaced with a realization that the other person is not as good a reproductive candidate as you first thought and that someone else will see you as the right person to to reproduce with. This is the case, Schopenhauer argues, even if you're not interested in having children or are too old to have them.

The ironic thing is that Schopenhauer didn't seem to have much success in finding the right person. He wrote a lot about the miseries of life and how things just get worse over time. I would think that there's more recent research into love and relationships. As a matter of fact Gottman comes readily to mind here.

But what it all boils down to is that if you're unhappy a good relationship may give you an intial bump in happiness but you will return to your "average" level in due time. If you're already pretty happy, as I would have described myself before Lidia, then you'll still get a bump but you will also settle back to your average level. I was happy before and I'll be happy after. I just need more time to work at it and let all these negative feelings subside.