A: That's a great story, and while the drama of it could suck in the greatest of stoics, I'm not totally sure I understand the question, but I'll give it a shot. Some people think it is impossible to love more than one person. However, it is only an emotion, something you feel. People don't ask questions when a person claims to love two flavors of ice cream. But what is that "love," if not an emotion or feeling.
Aah! Okay. There does exist different degrees of love. I may love chocolate more than I love vanilla, if even only a little. I may certainly love a person more than ice cream. But then again I like ice cream a lot more than other random people. So the equation goes:
Love someone > ice cream > other random people
Gaining clarity and quantifying emotions is only part of the solution. The other major part is how you respond to the equation. Would I say "No" to the person I love in favor of ice cream? If so, then under what conditions? What about other random people? Under what conditions?
And once you discover these boundaries, your own personal rules, then realize how much control do you have over these conditions? Do you position yourself to make choosing more difficult? To decide means to cut off from every other possibility. If you decide to choose your husband, are you really ready to face the consequences of that decision? And what would you be cutting yourself off from?
Forgetting your past is easy. Because there are already things you have forgotten, that you didn't even know you remembered. And if you can forget the things you don't even remember, then just think how easily you can forget to remember to not forget the things you do remember, haven't you? And just as easily the regret you had, which by the way, exists in the gap of understanding that you know something now that you didn't then, but thinking that you did know it then.
Once again it all goes back to decisions. We feel regret in the present when we think we should've made a different decision in the past. But the fact is you made that decision with all the information that was available to you at the time, except maybe one. In most cases, the decision wasn't thought through well enough. The consequences weren't weighed or were ignored. If you have considered every angle in the decision making process, then regret becomes silly. Then you can just say, "I made a decision and it had consequences that I did not like." And in either scenario, you will learn from the mistakes.
This is normal life. Learning is living. If you really want to move on then, go ahead and step back from all of this and notice what you learned, about other people, about these two guys, and especially yourself. And now what do you want to do with these learning's?
What direction do you want your life to take? (By the way, this is a DECISION--consider all the angles!) And with whom?
One thing I would recommend is to buy a book or two on decision-making. You already understand executing a decision, you just don't seem happy with the ones you make, which means some help with planning the decision could be useful."Yes" or "No": The Guide to Better Decisions by Spencer Johnson is simple and a terrific book on making decisions. Another one is Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Life Decisions by John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, Howard Raiffa. Good luck!
-Oz
