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The new semester also brought old faces into my classroom. I loved it when former students would stop by during their winter break from college. Chad came in to visit and was doing very well. Former students still in high school would continue to stop by after school as well. A combination of the two occurred at the beginning of February 2002. One student was after school to talk. She'd had the blues because she'd recently broken up with her boyfriend. We talked through it for a bit and I saw she was cheered up. Another student was in the class who'd broken up with his girlfriend a few weeks earlier and had just stopped to say hello. I was just about to do something fun on the blackboard when Jackie had stopped in for a weekend home from college. She sat and watched me build my mathematical model for finding the right person to spend the rest of your life with. The model works on two premises, one believable and the other sadly true. The believable one is that in the course of your lifetime you will meet ten people that you could consider marrying. The sadly true premise is that half of all marriages in this country end in divorce. The model attempts to help you discover who you can be happy with. Take the first person you fall in love with. This person will be in your top ten of lifelong possibilities. The trouble is, you don't know which one he or she is... could be number one... could be number ten. You don't know. If you hang around with this person for at least three years, and don't do anything that will get you slapped (like marrying before you turn 25), give it a shot! With that much time invested, you will really get to know the person very well. It just might work out! However, rarely is the case that a person marries their first love. Arguments happen, there are differences and changes in people as they grow from adoloscence into adulthood, and by the time you are 25 and mature enough intellectually and emotionally to get married you are rare indeed if you're still with your first love. |