"When lovers go poof"

Someone sent me this link to a short piece in today's Boston Globe Magazine.

The writer's curse - "Hey, why didn't I write that? I could have written that!"

But aside from missed opportunities on the writing side, it opened a door in my head to set someone free. The door was already unlocked so it was fairly easy to kick it a little more so it's open enough for me to kick him through it.

I say with great authority that we women are kind of living in the 18th century, in the days of Jane Austen, when if a man was paying particular note to you, escorting you places and etc. (courting you), he was more or less obligated to follow through. Or so they thought.

If you read Austen, or even Edith Wharton in the early 20th century, you think you know how difficult it was to get out of entanglements of the heart. And if a man, for example, took advice from a trusted friend and did vanish on a woman (read Pride & Prejudice if you don't know what I'm talking about), everyone said how unworthy you were.

Well, your wacko mother did, at any rate.

Nowadays, I think, women will blame the 21st century, the golden age of throw-away something as soon as you're tired of it - or when one or more of your friends tells you to - when a man goes "poof."

But I guess what I'm saying (in the most roundabout way possible) is - the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Austen really marvelously caught what is the essence of relationships, I think.

The problem is, there was always a happy ending (man's friend changes mind about woman and gives him "permission" to marry her in the end of P&P).

So I've given up thinking that either or any of the men who have vanished on me in the last 2 years (even as just friends, for goodness sake) will ever come back, except to occasionally post something on a status report on Facebook.

Actually, I'm deleting people from my friends' list on Facebook because that is the one awful rub that has taken the place of seeing someone at assembly balls and such in the days of Austen - seeing someone's name appear on your Facebook chat list and knowing they will never again chat with you or reply to your invitation to chat.

Ladies, pay attention to the red flags. Red flags don't deceive.