I've been thinking a lot about the different couples in Stephen's family now and their different relationships. Stephen jump-started the thought train yesterday in the car when he told me about one of Jon and Kaile's points of contention (Jon is younger brother #2): Jon sometimes forgetting to tend to her. Apparently Tim (younger brother #1) and Stephen's dad have the same quirk in their relationships with their wives.

This surprised me a lot, because Stephen and I do not have this problem at all. He is extremely attentive to me. And I'm very attentive to him, too, I think. So I found that kind of mind-blowing that three of the other couples in his family have this problem that is so different than us. But I don't think Eric and Cari will have the same problem. What's funny about that is, of all Stephen's siblings that are currently romantically attached, Stephen and Cari are the most similar in personality, and married the most similar types of people. Haha!

Speaking of Eric and Cari, one of the interesting differences I discovered on my thought train yesterday was the reason for the difference between how I relate to Jon and how I relate to Eric. I have a lot in common with both of them. But I'm drawn toward Jon, whereas I tend to want to keep my distance from Eric. I know why that is now. Eric and I have similar emotional baggage, and neither of us are wholly healed from it. It makes for a very surface-level friendship between us, but that's okay, because it puts me in a very interesting potential position with Cari. I understand, instinctively, a lot of Eric's emotional baggage, but I'm a girl, so I may be able to help Cari understand him when she's having trouble. Kind of like I do with Heidi and Alex. That would be so cool if I could do that. :) I love helping people understand each other.

Back to Jon. He made everybody cry at the wedding, oh my gosh! Including me. He made a wreck of me! What I have in common with Jon is a very, very strong emotional attachment to people. (In fact, I think we both may be HSPs.) And Jon has a very, very strong attachment to his sister in particular. They have acted like twins for a long, long time. :) So as best man at her wedding, well...

His speech started with, "Well, you've finally beat me to something. I beat you in walking, talking, getting my driver's license, getting my college degree [and on :) ]... You've finally beat me. You beat me to getting married."

And then he started to lose it, which made all of us lose it! He talked about how Cari's been his best friend for so long, and now he's losing her to her new best friend, Eric...

(AAAAHH, I'm crying again!)

As a girl who's lost a lot of people and felt great pain in each and every one, I understood exactly how Jon was feeling, and I could hardly hold myself together from all the memories of losses that suddenly swarmed up to my consciousness. But suddenly, his quick engagement and wedding in the same year as Cari suddenly made sense. He said something along the lines of, "It only makes sense that I would find and marry my new best friend in the same year." Wow. It made so much God-sense and all of a sudden I wasn't skeptical about Jon wedding Kaile at all, which was a great assurance to me.

Anyway, I was having such a hard time crying that both Stephen's great aunt and his old friend (whom I barely know! LOL), Rose, came and hugged me. Stephen did, too, of course. :) I wanted to just fall apart and go off to a quiet corner with him so badly until I was done... But I managed to find funny things to say and so got myself out of it early. But I'll probably finish it sometime later this week, knowing me! Tears can't stay bottled up inside of me for very long. Hopefully it's just not at work. :P

A-ny-way. Good grief--didn't realize I had so many words locked up! It seems like I had a few other things to say on the relationships in Stephen's family, but now I can't remember them. That's okay, I think I got out what I came for anyway. :)

-Stephanie

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