Mr. Right or Mr. Right Now

Growing up my dad had a never ending stream of advice to give to my brother and I. A few things stuck, while others went one ear and out the other of course.

“There’s people in your life who will be there for a good time, and then there’s people who will be in your life for a long time.” Well duh, right, seems like an obvious thing to say. But why was this so hard to apply to my real life? What was so enticing about the inaccessible?

I probably still couldn’t tell you.

We want people who are in our life as lessons, to stay for a lifetime. We make countless excuses for these people to stay in our life because we’re scared of a life without them. But how do we come to the conclusion of who is worth severing ties with and who can continue to makes these ‘unforgivable’ but yet forgivable mistakes?

aidan and mr bigWe all have one.

If you’re a Sex & the City fanatic like myself, then you know what I’m talking about, a Mr. Big. Or in my case, a Mr. Right.

But the questions I’ve sought after time and time again is he Mr. Right or just another Mr. Right Now? How long do we wait for Mr. Right to actually get things right? How many chances do we give the person we’ve deemed Mr. Right?

In essence, do we listen to what we think our intuition is telling us or do we do what is the obvious thing and move on, making Mr. Right just another Mr. Right Now.

Do we wait till the Guy in the sky wakes us up out of our sleep with the urge to just get up and leave.

Is it ever that simple?

For a friend of mine, it was just that. She called in the middle of the work day claiming she had a “come to Jesus” moment and swore she would never contact who would now be considered her Mr. Right Now. She got tired of the games and inconsistencies and decided that there was no way he could be her Mr. Right, no matter how much she wanted him to be.

For me it was never that easy. Mr. Right seemed just that, right.

He seemed like the obvious choice to any woman he came across, but I knew him a little better than just any woman. I knew him better than sometimes I’d like to admit, I knew and he knew that this was, right. But the worldly circumstances were just a little ahead of us. I’ve had to sit back and ask myself do I wait for Mr. Right and the right time or do I just keep meeting Mr. Right Now’s until we meet again.

I started to feel bad for moving on because he never actually did anything wrong, but the distance just felt like too much. I wanted nothing more than to just go back to how things were, but that wasn’t really an option because I was here and well, life had taken him elsewhere. Brief phone calls and nice messages held me over in the beginning but as life picked up for the both of us, communication started to die. We both agreed that this was something worth revisiting in the future, but how long does that agreement stand?

For me? I was willing to keep my end of the agreement until we met again, but that didn’t mean I’d stop my life for it. A year later, I found myself in a different relationship that took my mind off of the circumstances between Mr. Right and myself. A relationship that felt so right that I forgot that he would only be just another Mr. Right Now, and that’s just what he was, a Mr. Right Now: someone who comes for a good time, not a long time. No matter how much longer you wanted them to stay.

The end of Mr. Right Now and I’s relationship made me sit and think for quite sometime. If we were just each other’s Right Now’s, how many more would we have to go through to get to the Right one? Or in my case, back to the Right one.

And to all the women like me with their Mr. Right’s, if things were so complicated, does that make us Mrs. Right or just another Ms. Right Now?