Today, my good friend Albert received a letter from the wife of a former friend who once upon a time may or may not have had feelings for him. It is one of those letters where a person states that she still has feelings for you and that if you marry the current person you are with it will be a mistake. Anyway, Albert was presented with a dilemma about what to do in regards to his current relationship, a relationship that he doesn’t see helping him in doing all the things he wants to try to do with his life. If anything, something more permanent with this person would probably have a detrimental effect on the things that he would like to do in his life. His current girlfriend/fiancé is a nice enough person, but she really has no drive to do anything more than be with him and get married and have children. This is not something that Albert necessarily wants to do, so it might lead them to breaking up, which would probably be better in the long run. I, for one, know the affects of being in a relationship where one or both partners make sacrifices against what they want to do because of the other person.
The point of this is no matter how many times we tell friends or family that we are away from home and have little time to deal with their problems, they still insist on trying to make us become involved. There is not a whole lot we can do from thousands of miles away. By sending us their problems, it simply adds more stress to our day-to-day life over here. Granted, our daily stresses are not really life or death, but worries of troubles and issues at home is one less thing that we should be worried about and will make it harder to come back and reenter that life when the time comes.
It’s not that home problems aren’t important. The point is that the person at home is experiencing those issues AT HOME. Again, while we are not have a super difficult time over here, there are still things that we take for granted at home that we don’t get here, like days off from work or freedom to go places that you want and do things based on your own desires. So while you are depressed because you can’t find a job or a babysitter for the weekend, at least you are not in a place where you are apart from your friends and families without any real idea when you might be coming home to see them again. That feeling totally sucks.
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