Page 38 of That Weekend in Paris
“My mom,” Dillon says, “tried to teach me the red flags she said I should never ignore in a man.”
“Oh, yeah? Like what?”
“Let’s see,” she says. “A good man can always say he’s sorry. So, if I found myself with someone who could never apologize, I should cross him off the list of possibilities.”
“I’ll agree with that one. I would say we all need to be able to admit we’re wrong when we’re wrong. What else?”
“Never accept a man who talks down to you. Like, ‘If you’d work out, you’d look a lot better.’ Oh, and she also said that when a good man loves you, you’ll have a certain glow about you.”
I smile at this. “I kind of think that’s true. And it works both ways. I mean, should we really want to spend our life with someone who doesn’t make us happy?”
“The thing is,” Dillon says, “I don’t think there’s any way that we can be happy, one hundred percent of the time. Do you?”
“I think we could be happier a lot more than we are,” I say. “But, on the other hand, I don’t think we can look to another person for our happiness.”
“There is one other thing my mama used to say,” Dillon says.
“What’s that?”
“That we have to figure out how to make our own self happy, and that whoever we let into our lives should add to it, make it better, bigger, greater. And they shouldn’t want to change who we are. If the person we let in doesn’t pretty much want to keep us exactly as we are, then they don’t have any business being there.”
“Did Josh fit that?” I ask.
“As it turns out,” she says on a sigh, “no.”
“Did you figure that out before or after you married him?”
“In hindsight, before I married him. It’s just, I couldn’t bring myself to admit it, because I thought I had found my true soulmate.”
“What made you think that about him?”
“Truthfully?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess because he liked my songs. He thought I wrote amazing songs.”
“Well, you do.”
“I think, on a good day, I’ve done all right, but back then, I didn’t know that. I guess I was just starving for someone to validate my worth as a songwriter, and that’s exactly what Josh did.”
“And you thought you had to marry him for that?”
“No. I thought I was in love with him for that.”
“Do you think now that you never loved him?”
“I can’t say that. Josh has good qualities. It’s just, he didn’t take the part where we’re faithful to each other to heart, and I guess I did.”
“Do you think people are capable of that for an entire lifetime?” I ask.
“Yeah, I do. I really do. When you find the right person, the one who fills you up to the point that you have no hunger, no need to look to anyone else for the things love gives you.”
“I’m pretty sure Josh is going to regret?”
“I don’t think so,” she interrupts.
“He should,” I say.
