The trouble with love...

So I just broke up with my guy of four years. I think this may be the 17th or 18th time we've chosen to go our separate ways. This time it's certain (or so I say...). For the sake of privacy we'll call him Jimbo. Jimbo and I began seeing THE DAY AFTER I got out of a two year relationship with a man by the name of Charles. At that time, Charles was 27 when I was only 16. Needless to say it was a very interesting 2 years. My relationship with Charles caused a lot of strife between my family and I for the obvious reasons. We met at my first job where I worked as a drive through girl at Back-Yard-Burger. He was tall and perfectly muscular with nice skin and a beautiful smile. On my first day at the job I remember returning from the bathroom only to have him pull me to the side. To my horror I had been walking around with my work shirt tucked into my granny panties :( and people had been laughing at me for a good 5 or 10 minutes. From then on we were very flirtatious, and by the time I found out how much older than me he was it was too late. I brought him to my parents house to introduce him and like any good parents would, they flipped. For a year there was chaos in our house, my dad resented me and my mom thought I'd lost my mind. She believed that I was only seeing him to spite them and to rebel, when in all actuality I really did love him. Every time she would suggest a ridiculous reason for me keeping up the relationship it would push me away even further. When they took away my cell phone I would sneak out to Walgreens to talk to him on the pay phone. When I was only allowed to drive my car to go to work, I leave my job early and shoot straight across town to see him. We exchanged these notebooks of all different colors. He would fill them up with drawings and poetry for me and I'd do the same. Our relationship was sweet and our love was true...and because very few people approved it felt like it was us against the world. Eventually ish hit the fan! My dad got fed up and I was kicked out of my house. This was a year later and I now worked at a grocery store. My dad pulled up with all of my things in trash bags and threw them on the ground and told me that if I wanted to go be with him he wasn't going to try and stop me anymore. I was humiliated and bawled hysterically...I was 16 then and I haven't lived at home since. I lived with Charles for a year. First, with his mom and 7 nieces and nephews in this small house in Westwood. Westwood was the opposite of where my folks lived. The house next door to us had several people living there but no electricity. The ten year old boy who would come out to play sometimes had already contracted the HIV virus. Sometimes there wasn't enough food to eat and there were 2 people to almost every bed. Most people would have fled back to suburbs but I welcomed the experience. Charles and I eventually got a place together in a better par of town. I had graduated early from high school to get a jump on college and he was working temp jobs. He had a ten year old son whose mom worked at an agency and could always find him work if he needed it. As wrong as the age discrepancy was he loved me. His nickname for me was pumpkin. Every night he would cook for me and when he felt I needed it, run me baths. He was very affectionate and we often did things like go for walks along the Mississippi or fly kites under the moon. I was invited to all the big family holiday dinners and we went to church with his mom every Sunday. He even got me an engagement ring. Every time we broke up we'd get back together...until one day. One day I was on campus and let Charles borrow my car to go to work. He showed up after one of my classes having lost yet another temp job and like an Epiphany it came to me ( in my Chrisette voice!). While I had grown so much in the past 2 years, he was the exact same person I met in the Burger joint. Love had blinded me. He loved to cook but made no efforts to look up a culinary school. He made straight A's in high school but had no plans to further his education. By this time he was 29 and jobless again with no savings, vision for himself, or plans for the future. Not to mention if I had married him, I would have been a step mother to his 10 year old son! After coming to this realization I was enraged. I had wanted a future with him for so long and finally realized that future would eventually be a sad and poor life. I was angry I had graduated early and left my friends to move our lives forward. I was angry that he had been the source of so much pain and anger in my family. I immediately broke it off with him! I went to our apartment and broke all the dishes. I took everything we had that I couldn't break...TVs, clothes (his and mine), pots, pans, dvd player, food and shoved them in my car. I pored canola oil all over the floors and stopped up the bath tub after turning the water on high (I hoped it'd over flow!). THE TROUBLE WITH LOVE IS IT SOMETIMES BLINDS YOU, AND MAKES YOU SETTLE FOR LESS THAN YOU DESERVE. When the Beetles sang, "ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE," they were lying. While love is definitely the most important part of a relationship it can't sustain 2 people by itself. In relationships, we (especially women) don't take the WHOLE picture into account. In my opinion there are 2 groups of traits that people should look for in a significant other. There are traits for peace of mind and then traits for peace of heart. Peace of mind traits are more objective. They include the basic things we all desire in a partner like a nice job,reputable finances, and education, a supportive family, ect. The heart side is the emotional side. Qualities that satisfy the emotional side are honesty, being an efficent communicator, faithfulness, loyalty, and of course being a good lover;) The trouble with people is we settle for one set of qualities...and often times not even the whole set. My best girl friend dated a guy for years who was wealthy but treated her like garbage. He would verbally abuse her and even slept with a good friend of hers and she still didn't leave him because she found a since of security with his financial situation. A lot of women are like this. Despite the lack of a truly strong physical/emotional relationship, they will go after and stay with the man with the good finances or the opporitunity to be comfortable. I am a firm believer that every woman should be protected and provided for, but to be with someone solely based on material gain is not what's up. At all. To some it doesn't matter if there is no chemistry or how badly they suffer with a realtionship emotionally, if money is there. I usually fall for the guys that have all of the emotional qualities and are lacking a little on the financial side. If I'm attracted to him, he takes care of me, doesn't cheat, and we can have a good time together, then I'm smitten. I'm a hippie by nature so I don't like diamonds or fancy purses. A little attention and and cheap bottle of wine will do. While the relationship is golden for a while, it goes bad in a few years when I realize that in the future me and my guy would have a hard time helping to raise a family or even taking a vacation. Like my relationship with Charles, Jimbo and I weren't short on love. If anything we had an extra supply. We had relationship full of home cooked meals, tickling fights, wrestling matches, kissing, high times, mini vacays, shit talking, the list goes on. Like Charles, he gave me peace of heart. When it came to peace of mind however, there was a problem. Neither of my exes could provide me with peace of mind about our future together because of their financial short comings. It would be nice to have a kid one day and not have to worry about if the baby will be able to eat every day...or every other day. For the ladies who engage men solely on potential financial wealth, they usually come up lonely in the love department. They will settle for someone who doesn't meet other basic requirements in exchange for monetary gain. The foundation of the relationship is so shallow that it eventually turns completely devoid and loveless. I dated Charles for 2 years before I realized that not having peace of heart AND mind would lead to an unhappy ending. Jimbo...4 years!!! You better believe that from now on I won't settle for less than the best of both worlds.