Friends on vacation.

Vacation Story 2.
Good friends are the ones who help you survive your other relationships.
I have gone on some vacations with male Significant Others and have had some great times. I’ve also gone on such a vacation and have had not such a great time. I once went on a vacation with a former male Significant Other with whom I had remained “just friends.” We had a non-sexual blast and traveled together more comfortably than we did when we were more intimately involved. We even stayed in the same hotel room, used the same bathroom etc. (He’s coming into town in a few weeks, and he’s going to stop by with a bottle of wine and stories to tell me about his new life in Portland, OR.)
Good friends are the ones who help you survive your other relationships.
I always have almost perfect vacations with my women friends. We don?t actually divide up the chores of sharing space in a rented cottage, but it all always flows with ease and good humor. It’s not that we are all similar in temperament and talents; rather we are all adamant about being respected for who and how we are. And, of course, we actually like each other, and we like to both nurture and be nurtured.
The three of us in Maine this time have all been divorced (one of us three times); two of us have kids; one of us was raped in her teens; we all like men and are all tired of the struggle it always seems to be to keep our integrity, identity, and voice in a relationship with a man. We are tired of their not taking responsibility for everything from household chores to extended family dynamics. We are tired of accommodating. For the other two, it’s probably a temporary thing; one is five years younger than I and the other 9 years younger. For me it’s probably a permanent fatigue.
So, it?s not surprising that we spent several Maine evenings last week sitting around doing a “group therapy” thing. We?ve all been through it; we know how to listen and how to respond with compassion and encouragement; we all know how to constructively construct any criticism we might have, how to wrap our suggestions in heartstrings. We don’t always agree, but we give each other lots to think about, and we accept our disagreements as part of who we are.
And, when we play Boggle, we get very competitive, shrieking and whooping, bitching, and guffawing. We forgot a dictionary this time, so we had a few arguments about the validity of a few word spellings. Heh. They tend to defer to me because I taught English. I frequently bluff when I’m not sure; I’m also frequently right!
I?m sure that we gave the quiet people in the neighboring cottages something to wonder about — what with all the Boggling noise, the frequent group hugs, the strange sage/cedar smudging smells, the echoing tones of my Tibetan bell, and the fire burning in my mini-cauldron on the deck on our last night there, where we symbolically exorcised the bad stuff we?d been carrying around. (More on that later.)
Good friends are the ones who help you survive your other relationships.

2 thoughts on “Friends on vacation.

  1. I hope mean that in a good way. Everything in life is a trade-off, and each of us has to decide what’s most important and where we want to put our energies.

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