Osmosis

They say people tell you who they are when you first meet them. That you need to listen to them when they are saying, This is who I am.

I didn't trust my instincts when I was a young woman & was quite the idiot when it came to judging people's character. Are you a pathological liar? How fascinating! Let's be best friends!

And that especially pertains to men. I dated a guy for 5 years who told me on our first date what a commitment phobe he was & how frustrated he was professionally. I ignored him & paid the price. When I finally left him & moved halfway around the world to do it, I met my soul mate & guess who suddenly proposed marriage? What an idiot. That's me, I'm talking about. My ex was just being who he was.

What kept me from leaving my ex all those years? I wanted to steal his life. Well, more like his childhood. I wanted to absorb it by osmosis. Guilt by association?

Before his father tragically died of cancer a few years older than I am now, & their whole life went to shit, my ex lead the life of a young prince on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

His parents were both artists & they lived in a 16 room apartment on Central Park West.
They traveled the world & spent holidays in Spain & Africa for months at a time. They went to exclusive private schools & famous actors & artists lived in their building.

Even though this was way over by the time we met, after all, he was an adult living in Connecticut. But he still reeked of his marvelous upbringing & so did his childhood friends.

My upbringing was quite different. I grew up in poverty, the youngest child of a Jewish immigrant who narrowly escaped the concentration camps. My mother was a single parent & had a volatile temperament( to put it kindly) & was also an orthodox Jew.
My education was a miracle of scholarships to private schools & my summer holidays were scholarships to summer camp in the Adirondacks. I got away as quickly as I could.