Poetry and My Wife

If you check the comments on my last post, you'll see a question about poetry and my wife. The question was "have you ever written your wife poems?".

I figured that I might as well answer that question for the benefit of everyone who reads this blog.

So, in short, the answer is yes. However, they were all written in the first few months we were dating. I was as giddy as a man could be at the time, and as a result, the poems are so sappy that I'm embarrassed to show them. Sure, Ruth appreciated them quite a bit, but when I look at them now, I realize they are extremely crappy ( I'm sure you've heard the expression "A face only a mother could love". Well, these poems were "Poems only a girlfriend could love".) . Perhaps not everybody needs to be a "tortured artist" to produce good art, but I'm convinced that I'm incapable of producing good poetry unless I'm a little bit tormented.

So, that's the "short" answer, but it's not the whole story.

You may be wondering, "What about the time you were courting Ruth?". Surely there must have been a time in that courtship when I was not so giddy? Surely there must have been a time when I wasn't convinced she would be my girlfriend. Surely there was a time went I felt quite lovelorn, and spent my time wooing her?

Well, the answers to the questions above are "yes". There certainly was a period of lovelorn wooing. So, why didn't that period of my life produce some Ruth-inspired poetry? Why wasn't poetry part of the wooing process?

Well, to understand that your are going to have to understand more about how Ruth and I ultimately became a couple. In order to understand that, you are going to have to click on this link.

Seriously now, I mean it. Click this LINK NAO!

This link, which I will keep repeating until you actually click it, tells the story about how Ruth and I became a couple. It is filled with sweetness, and it is called "First Kiss". Admittedly, it will take up 6 minutes and 40 seconds of your valuable time, but if it doesn't evoke an "AWW!" out of you, then you have a heart of stone, my friend. I mean, hey - I married the girl I had my first kiss with. Isn't that concept inherently sweet?

In any case, I hope clicking was done above, because I would love your feedback on my story. However, for those who don't have the time to click now, I will help you out by giving you this little nugget from the story:

I found out ( from a reliable source ) that Ruth was interesting in me before I attempted to court her. However, my initial attempt at courting went so badly that she soon told me that the she would never date me under any circumstances.

So, there was period of time when I was feeling quite rejected and lovelorn. So why no poetry? Well, soon after she told me "I'll never date you", I wrote Ruth a love letter. This did not go well. The letter made her quite angry. She wrote me a letter back to tell me my letter made it even less likely ( and she'd already told me "never" ) that she'd date me.

So, at this point, I needed to change my strategy a bit. I was certainly thinking of writing her some love poems, but it now seemed that sending her such poems would hurt my chances rather than help my chances. So, I took a step back and decided to just try and be good friends with her ( She was quite willing to be friends with me, which certainly gave me a clue that all was not lost ). I wrote her some more letters, but these were not "love letter" letters, at least not in an overt way. The letters certainly didn't contain any sappy love poems, or even any sappy prose. They were friendly letters, which helped Ruth to get to know me better. The letters helped Ruth become more comfortable with me. In the letters, I apologized for my earlier love letter, and for the stupid things I said when I first attempted to court her. No, they weren't love letters, but those letters are what ultimately won her over. And what happened when she was finally won over? Well, if you don't know the answer to that yet, you will need to CLICK.

So, no poems to Ruth during the courtship, because that would have been counter-productive. However, even though I was feeling lovelorn, there also were not any "woe is me!"-type poems that I wrote for myself. I think that's because even though Ruth told me "never", I never really believed her. For the first time in my life, I had confidence that I could win a girl's heart.

So, I've blogged/vlogged quite a bit about this subject, but one question you might have still remains unanswered. It's a question I was too embarrassed/ashamed to answer in front of my much larger YouTube audience, but for you special folks who take the time to read my blog, I think I will answer it now. The question is: "What went so wrong when I was initially courting Ruth? How did I mess things up so badly that I almost lost the love of my life?".

Well, it all has to do with the very fine line between confidence and arrogance. You hear all the time (and I don't doubt that it's true ) that most women are attracted to confidence in a man. Well, Ruth is not "most women". Ruth hates even the slightest amount of cockiness in a man, and she pretty much considers any high degree of confidence to be the same thing as arrogance. To this day, she gets a little bit angry if she detects too much confidence in me. I don't want to spend too much time playing amateur psychologist here, and I won't go into specifics about Ruth's past relationships, but I do think that the way she feels about confidence in man has something to do with stuff that happened in the years before she met me. I actually heard a Maria Mena song recently ( Found it on one of my blog reader's YT page. Thank you, you know who you are. :) ), that has some lyrics which might just give a clue about the way Ruth feels about men with too much confidence.

In any case, I had been rejected by every other girl I had courted in the past. My self-esteem had dipped to a point where I didn't think any girl would ever be interested in me. Thus, when I found out that Ruth was interested in me, I was filled with lots of confidence. The confidence itself wasn't a bad thing, but I should have been smart enough not to let Ruth see too much of that confidence.

I took completely the wrong approach when I - um- approached her. I should have done everything in my power to hide that fact that I knew she was interested in me. Instead, I essentially told her ( not in these exact words ) "Hey, I hear you are interested in me.".

I know, I know. What an idiot I was.

There was so much I didn't understand about women at the time. There was so much I didn't understand about people at the time.

I should have understood that most women ( including Ruth ) want to feel like they being pursued during a courtship. I should have understood that all people want to be with somebody who makes them feel special. I certainly didn't make Ruth feel special when I first attempted to court her, and I'll always regret that. I'll always regret that I hurt her feelings. I'll always regret that her first memory of our courtship will probably always be a rather sad and disappointing one. I didn't make her feel special at all, and she certainly deserved to feel special. If I could go back and change anything in my life, it would be those first few moments when I started to court Ruth.

In any case, it's not exactly a great revelation that love can be a complex thing. We all know that. We've all lived that. All you can really do is stumble your way through life and hope things work out in the end.

Well, this blog has got me thinking about a lot of things that I don't have time to blog about right now. I've already got my idea for my next post. There's so much I know now, that I wish I knew way back when. I think I will call my next post "Things I learned after it was too late".

Rich