My friend Rachel and I were discussing one of my tweets. In a moment of reflection, I tossed off a few words, and it was interesting to see the response it got from my friends on Twitter. I was quite entertained by the idea of my tweet inspiring a blog post, and so here is what she wrote. It's good to see things from a woman's perspective.

“God have mercy on man who puts all his faith and trust in a young woman to never change her mind.”

Despite (or possibly because of) the split infinitive, this tweet from Greek made an impression me. It might have been my favorite tweet of the day, which is no small feat on the part of Greek because I subscribe to CS_Lewis (he also subscribes to me, which is weird).

I think Greek is right, men who put all their faith and trust in young women are sorely in need of God’s help, and possibly the help of a good psychiatrist as well. Very little is more subjective and therefore more subject to change than the minds and convictions of young woman. But before I (a former young woman) slap a self-deprecating label on my sex, I will assert that this constant shifting is, for young women and men alike, one of their greatest evolutionary gifts.

Evolution is based in the idea that we adapt to our environment and reinvent our ideas and ourselves in response to a changing world lest it leave us in its dust. Scientifically, that which does not change does not survive. Psychologically, that which does not adapt is unable to move on and grow. Romantically, it sucks to be dumped, which is where evolution hurts, really hurts.

The most important person a young woman can come to know and understand in her young woman days is herself. Once she can stop changing her mind about who that person is and what she wants, she can with a measure of stability welcome someone new in to discover what she has come to know. I, and the suitors of my youthful days had to learn this the hard way. I changed my mind a great deal as a young woman and continue to do so as a not-so-young woman, and that’s a blessed good thing. Becoming entrenched in my choices at a time when my favorite nail polish color changed weekly would have been a terrible idea, and many of my ideas at that time were just that. This being said, who is the greater fool, the woman using her evolutionary gift of self-reflection or the young man who is disappointed after becoming foolishly entrenched wanting someone who didn’t know what she wanted after all?

Speaking in the romantic sense, loving someone who does not love you is not really loving them at all. People fall in love often, more often with ideas and feelings than with other people. I stand firmly in the camp that love unrequited is a hope, a feeling, and most certainly a desire, but is not real love. Our difficulty, male and female alike, is letting go of what isn’t real in pursuit of what is, especially when it departs from the plan we’ve constructed. It also forces to come to terms with the terrifying idea that perhaps we don’t know what’s best for ourselves, and that our minds must change in order to become who we were meant to be all along. In those sad moments of unrequited love, I will assume the risk of sounding like a Lifetime movie to tell you that love in purest form lets go, not just of people but also of ideas. Real love allows someone to become who they are regardless of where that places them in relationship to you. In other words, real love changes, molding and shaping itself to those loved, not those who love. It’s a most daunting risk.

I think the disturbance I sense in that tweet is not so much at the flippancy of young women but with the idea of risk itself. Unfortunately for us finite beings, risk is the method by which we obtain all things worth having. If you’re a young man planning on loving a young woman, you would both do well to know that the person you choose today is in many ways not who she will be tomorrow. It’s not a once-and-for-all choice, it’s a commitment to wake up every day and choose her again and again all the while hoping she does the same. You don’t get to be certain, you don’t get a guarantee, what you get is one day a time. If you can’t live with that, you might as well stop trying to include people in your life altogether.

To bring it back to the tweet, I would caution any young man to check for a stable foothold before placing trust in any young woman. If you discover none and still forge ahead, don’t blame her flippancy for your broken heart. Get up, brush off, and, for your own sake, change your mind.

EDIT: Video I just saw that kind of goes with post.

Blogger X has submitted a guest post I decided to run because it has a unique perspective. Some minor editing occurred.

Just a little over a month before my 23rd birthday, I met the girl who would become my first girlfriend. I was dabbling at the piano in the lobby of my apartment complex when I heard a voice out of nowhere say "You play and sing beautifully." I turned around and there was a girl of a small stature with sandy brown hair and blue eyes. She introduced herself as "Susan" and said she was a junior at BSU studying astrophysics.

I must say I was immediately interested. It seems rare and unusual to find a girl as geeky as I am (which should go without saying - I was a grad student at BSU at the time). She had nobody to go to the Chinese New Year celebration with, and so she asked if I'd go with her. Having nothing to do that night and facing a monstrous take-home exam that had worn me out (and needed a break from), I agreed. The rest, as they say, is history.

The first couple of months were what I thought of as a fairy tale. I had all but given up at finding love, to be honest not many women would want to accept me at my face value, I would almost certainly have to change certain aspects of myself to even have a chance (something I'm not willing to do).

Soon after my 23rd birthday, our relationship became sexual. At 23 years old, I was still a virgin, and so was she at the age of 21. That night was, shall we say, fun (or so it was at the time). We seemed to be naturals at the sex game, and we had some of the best "first timer" sex that anyone seems to have. Of course, things just sort of went on from there, and as the months went on, sex became an even bigger part of our relationship with each other. Even after her awful accident that nearly claimed her life, we remained very sexually intimate, picking up where we left off just two short weeks afterward.

So came the middle of May where she claimed she was heading home to see a younger brother who was about to be deployed. I drove her to the airport and kissed her goodbye, but of course, not before having one last whoopee session that morning. We would, after all, be apart from each other for two months, so we wanted to make it really count for something.

So comes the end of June, when I go into IHOP for some breakfast early in the morning. Little did I know I was about to have the biggest shock of my life. I looked across the restaurant, and sitting cuddled up to another guy, was the very woman who I called my girlfriend. Yeah, I was devastated, not going to lie. As I confronted her on the way out, and decided at that point our relationship was over, I just felt my heart breaking into a million tiny little bite-sized pieces.

We were separated from one another for some time, but she called me one evening and told me she was having a rough time and if she could hang out at my apartment. Like an idiot I agreed. So we had dinner, some wine, and after a few glasses we were tipsy, and we again had sex with one another. Over the next few weeks we would be more like "friends with benefits," and we had sex on a number of occasions even though we weren't officially dating anymore.

Needless to say, there came a point I resented her so bad I needed to push her out of my life. That was very, very hard to do. Part of me hated her, but I grew to really love sex. You could almost say I was addicted to it. It made me feel good when I wasn't feeling so good.

It was definitely hard pushing her out of my life, if for no other reason than that. I'd feel sexually deprived over the next month or so, eventually getting over it. Of course, Susan still has something of mine that I'll never be able to get back, that of course being my virginity. And I will always have hers too, and it serves as a dark reminder of how things turned sexual between us far too soon.

I'll admit it, I used to be one of those that thought the only real reason for being sexually pure until marriage was religious. Having been an atheist at the time, I thought the arguments given in favor of abstinence were silly, and as such I paid absolutely no attention to them, and that is probably my biggest regret in my relationship with her.

What happened that night between myself and a girl I no longer love comes back to haunt me every day, and it also made it just that much more difficult to separate myself from her. I can't imagine breaking up every being an easy thing to do, but let's face it: we as humans have an emotional attachment to sex. We can't detach our emotional side from it, no matter how hard we try. Casual or premarital sex will always have emotional consequences, and I don't care whether you're a Christian or an atheist or whatever other religion.

Sexual purity truly isn't just for religious people. If you love yourself enough, and you respect yourself enough, and you truly want what's best for your emotional health, regardless of what you personally believe on a religious level, you will remain sexually pure until marriage. Guard your heart, and stay safe.

I participated in the Blog Swap at 20-Something Bloggers, and my guest for this post is Angela from Craving Cupcakes. My entry on this topic is posted on her site: check it out. Say hi to Angela. Also, let me put in a word for 20sb.net, a site for 20-something bloggers no matter what platform they use. There are over 12,000 members, check it out!

I was first introduced to blogging back in 2004. I started off on Live Journal, and made a few friends. In fact, my closest blogging friend and I met on LJ! Eventually, my posts started fizzling out. I still hadn’t discovered exactly who I was, so I was tiring of post the same nonsense every day. I stopped blogging for a few months, but started missing it terribly. What exactly was I missing though? I thought that I had grown tired of blogging, yet here I was contemplating getting back into it.

I started to discover blogs outside the world of LJ. Many of these blogs I’d be checking daily, savoring each and every word that was written. And then I started to realize exactly what I missed about blogging. I missed the sense of community. I missed the friendships. I missed the people who were so much like me, I’d swear we were related. My mind was made up, and within a couple of weeks, I had signed myself up for a blogger account. Thanks to reading other blogs, I had discovered 20 Something Bloggers, and signed up right away. Best decision I’ve made, because now I get to be a part of amazing things, like Love Harder.

I’ve made a few more friends, and they’re all seriously amazing. If I need a recommendation for something (music, books, recipes, place to travel and visit), they’re there for me. When I let on that problems in my life kept piling up and I was growing weary, two of my blogs friends emailed me to check on me and make sure I was ok. These friends encourage me to grow and learn every day. I also love how blogging lets me discover who I am; it lets me work through my problems.

I really couldn’t name just one thing that’s best about blogging, because there’s just too much to love. 

Thanks for the guest post, Angela!

Guest post from a friend. I thought the last questions were very interesting, so I asked her to borrow the post and thus see what you all thought.

I do in-home health care.

The woman I take care of is a bitter, disabled, depressed woman.

A few months ago she had a few seizures and spent quite awhile in the hospital. Today she told me that she wishes she had died during the seizures. She won't leave her house except for doctor appointments. She doesn't like to have visitors. She won't sleep in her bed because it reminds her of her live-in boyfriend who moved out years ago so she sleeps on the couch where she can't get comfortable so she never sleeps good. She won't listen to anyone; everything in the house must be done exactly how she wants it to be done. She routinely lies to everyone - doctors, caretakers, anyone. She has one son who lives several hours away. He barely comes to see her because she barely acknowledged him when he was growing up - he was mostly at his dad's house. She won't do anything to help herself improve physically. And emotionally she won't even admit that there's a problem.

And she's bipolar.

I know that last part is just an addition to all of the other problems, but I see it as a huge one.

Around the same time she had a major back injury 20 years ago and needed surgery, she was diagnosed with bipolar. She was so down and such an angry, moody person that she chased her family away. Eventually it got to where it is now - never leaving, barely acknowleding her family. And witih bipolar that's barely under control.

Somehow in the 2 years of taking care of this woman, I've grown attached to her because she needs someone. She's basically adopted me as her daughter.

In that attachment though, I grow more scared every day as I see what her medical conditions are doing to her.

My bipolar is almost under control - it's definitely much better than it had been. But I fear sometimes that I'll end up like her.

That's the times that I hate this bipolar. Yes, I'm so blessed to have friends who care, but they're not there everyday with me. It's precisely because she doesn't have family/friends there everyday that she's gotten so bad.

I have family around me, but they're not checking on my emotional state, so it's like not having anyone there. My mom saw some scars on my legs that are old and she was asking what it was and didn't believe me when I told her they were old. Yet she didn't ask if I had cut anywhere else on my body or if I had cut recently. She didn't ask to see my arms which are now covered in cuts from the last few days. She only asks if I'm cutting when she sees the cuts. That's not support. Don't get me wrong, I love my mom and am so grateful for the support that she's been, but as far as cutting goes, she's never been able to be a support.

Can anyone identify with what I'm saying here? I go to work and fear that my mental illness may result in me living in a condition like I find everyday. That condition isn't living!

This leads me to think about the church and what position the church should have in mental illesss.

If you have a mental illness and especially if you suffer from something like cutting or binging/purging or anything that is an addictive habit (smoking, drinking, porn, etc), you know the power of accountability. Having someone asking EVERYDAY how you're doing is crucial to moving ahead.

What about for those people who don't have that? Should it be the church's responsiblity to provide an accountability like that? The church should be reaching out and recognizing these types of needs, but should it also be responsible in that way?

What should be the church's role in the life of the mentally ill church member?

Hi folks. So I was thinking, next Saturday (31st) would be the perfect time to have a Xanga TV festival! After all, many of you will already be dressed in costumes for Halloween. And it would be the perfect way to close a month of guest posts. So here's what I'm looking for. If you have a webcam, and you want to participate, send me a message. I'll compile all the responses and then see what technology we need to use. We can use Xanga TV or a different site, depending on the need. Let me know if you are in!

DETAILS: Halloween, 10PM EST, here on my site. We will be using TokBox, which allows multiple cams at once. Bring your webcam and a costume!

Michael has been doing some interesting things with Audio Blogs, and graciously agreed to share one as a guest post. Remember, only a few more days are left in the month for guest posts! Please share if you have one in mind

As part of a 20-something blog group I belong to, I am swapping blogs with Holly for the day. Enjoy her post, and go to her site to see my post later today!
UPDATE: My post is up on her site! Go read.

The internet is an incredible medium. It allows people to connect from across the world who might have otherwise never met. In fact, before I became the World of Warcraft-playing, story-writing, resume-singing rock star I am now, I was a pre-teen book nerd who loved science fiction, technology and chatting online, and it's because of these nerdy habits that I made some of the closest friends I have.

When I was 11 years old, I picked up Animorphs, a series by K. A. Applegate. The books were about a group of pre-teens who could turn into animals thanks to alien technology, and they used this power to (how else?) defend the earth from evil aliens called Yeerks. My pre-teen self was obsessed, and you can imagine my geeky delight upon discovering that there were kids like me reading the series all around the world, and they were talking about them online.

So, I logged onto the internet and joined a message board for fans of Animorphs. There, I talked about spoilers, fan-fiction and casting for the now-canceled Nickelodeon series with kids whose screennames were "Nothlit" and "FlufferMcKitty." We became digital pen pals, sharing late-night e-mails instead of letters and trying out "voice chats" on our parent's computers. While I had my friends in middle school during the day, my online friends quickly became virtual pen-pals.

Although tweet-ups and blogger meet-ups have become an accepted part of digital life, "online friends" still carries that social stigma. Like, oh, you couldn't make friends in real life? But these kids--now adults--had become such an important part of who I was as a teenager and young adult. Protected by anonymity, we shared our secrets and offered advice and, really, helped each other grow.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to meet my online friends in person. I was a nervous wreck--what if they were nothing like the people I chatted with online? What if they were creepy? Or axe murderers? What if they thought I was a creepy axe murderer?

Fortunately, they were none of those things. In fact, when I met my online friends, it didn't feel like we were meeting for the first time. "Roses" and I picked up right where our last instant messages ended, and "Tyrael" was just as funny in person as he was online.

Animorphs has long since concluded, but my online friends and I still chat and share e-mails on a regular basis. I look back now, and I'm really amazed by how long it's been. A few lines on a message board transformed into very real friendships, and I am proud to name Roses, FlufferMcKitty and all the others as some of my closest friends.

Thanks to the talented Carolina17 for writing a guest post for me!

One upon a time in a middling county in Pennsylvania that was not quite Amish Country, not quite Coal Country, and not quite the Delaware Valley, lived a very shy girl in a very small house bordered on all sides by magic cornfields. They must be magic, she reckoned, because they stretched on for ever and ever as far as she could see, and she could walk for hours and never see another soul save for some cows or an occasional farm-dog. She lived alone; that is to say, she lived in the tiny house with her parents and no brothers or sisters, for to a small girl this is just the same as living alone.
Her early years were happy enough, as she was doted on by her parents' friends, and had no earthly idea that children were generally meant to socialize with other children, or that people normally lived in bigger houses that had other houses next to them, or that bathroom tiles were not supposed to occasionally tumble loose from the wall and never be replaced. She read books upon books, watched public television and drank A&W cream sodas that her parents' friends bought her from the vending machine in their break room. Life was simple and good.
Upon reaching the age of five something new happened to the girl. It was called Kindergarten and it was terribly confusing. Quite suddenly she was tossed into a yellow bus and carried off to a place full of other children the same age as she was. It was exciting at first--the only other people her own age the girl was acquainted with were her two cousins. But the girl did not belong in this new place. Most of these other children didn't even know how to read, and didn't know the answers to any of the questions the teacher asked. So the girl answered them all, and the teacher got mad at her! She stopped answering questions entirely after that.
None of these fellows could sit with a book or a simple toy for hours at a time. They could not do a thing longer than twenty seconds without moving to something else, and grew bored with the girl very quickly. Being painfully shy, she was also nearly unable to talk to anyone, and so made very few friends.
The girl advanced in years and grades, but little changed. She was lucky enough to have better teachers as time went on, who told her that knowing all the answers was not a bad thing and had her put in a gifted class for all the children who did. And in the fourth grade she met a girl even shyer than herself, called Kerry, who would remain her best friend for years and years. But the older she got, the more aware she became of her social inability. She could not play any sport well, had no interest in MTV or fashion or gossip, and knew nothing of this sudden fascination everyone had with boys, and so had no common ground with anyone. It was only years later that she realized what everyone discovered around age twelve was something she had been experiencing all her life; she had, since the age of four, routinely gazed upon one male face or another and fallen hopelessly in love. She had in fact been fixated on the redhead from Clarissa Explains it All from first all the way through to fourth grade. Her favorite playground activity remained the swing: solitary, peaceful, and license to kick anyone who got in the way.
High school came and the girl still did not change, although everyone around her did. Girls gained chests, boys gained chest hair, everyone gained terrible skin. Their attention spans did not increase as a general rule, nor did their tolerance for this strange girl who enjoyed reading books and dressing oddly. They did not know that she dressed in such a way to avoid being completely unnoticed as she had been in years past. She became something of a celebrity; a mocked one, granted, but a celebrity nonetheless. This remained her private joke on her peers.
In fact, high school was not so terrible overall. The girl's friend count swelled to six, an unprecedented number for her. Boys still paid her no mind, but there would be time for that later, she reasoned. In the meantime she had songs to sing, papers to write, Pi to recite. From the minute she stepped foot in the door of her tiny house until the minute she fell asleep, there was never a half-hour without something amusing on television. Life was simple and good.
Still, the girl was restless. She knew now that the cornfields were not magic, and that there was a whole world outside their monotony, outside the drudgery of her repetitive existence. The television told her it was so. It showed her a wondrous city named Chapel Hill where movie theaters were within walking distance and beautiful boys with glowing skin (one in particular with great green eyes like china saucers) played basketball in front of thousands. She knew she could not live within the cornfields forever, so one day she at last departed for the place called Carolina.
Her years in Carolina were happy, to a point. When she walked to the movies, had dinner with one of the heaps of new friends she made, or on that one glorious occasion when the beautiful boy with green saucer eyes actually touched her (!), she felt a contentment she had never felt among the cornfields. This is a real magic place, she reasoned, because everything I could want is here; how could I ever be sad again?
But to her own amazement, she was sad. Often. It would sneak up on her gradually, then collapse from behind with the force of a tidal wave. This place Carolina, it did not want people living there forever. They were meant to stay only a short time, decide what they were to do with the rest of their lives, then leave. But she could not decide. There was nothing she truly wanted to do, and a growing sense of panic simmered just below her surface.
This was not entirely true. There was something the girl wanted to do more than anything else. That was to love someone and be loved in return. She could not do this either. She came very close one time, as close as a long kiss on a plaid sofa, a very passionate kiss in fact. Leastwise it was on her end; the other half of the kiss, as it turned out, felt nothing at all, and she was forced to kick him out in a tearful rage. Love remained out of her grasp. It tormented her with insidious thoughts, thoughts that went 'You'll always be alone, you pathetic creature. What business do you have wishing for sweet amber-eyed track boys from Colorado who are six levels out of your league? There is a reason the only person who ever asked for your number was a cross-eyed scene kid who couldn't hold up his end of the conversation. You should call him back. Beggars can't be choosers.'
Her friends, nearing the end of their time in Carolina, became heavily involved in their own lives. They stopped calling, stopped arriving at her door, stopped seeing her entirely. Her friends from high school remained in touch, but they were of course great distances away. The girl had no idea what to do anymore. She distracted herself with books and sporting events and long walks. She no longer had her amber-eyed track boy to confide in. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she could not cry. Mostly she drifted, as one hopelessly lost.
The girl had been told before that she had some kind of talent for writing. She did not wholly believe this, having read enough books to know that she did not compare with what was out there. But the more she thought about it, the more she was sure that there was absolutely nothing else she could imagine doing with her life.
One day the girl was asked to write a piece for a friend of hers. Having nothing more compelling to set down, she wrote her own story. It had occasional embellishments and omitted some things, but it was true and heartfelt. She spent an hour pouring her heart onto the page, and in that hour not one negative thought crept its way into her psyche. She was unconcerned with the direction of her future. It no longer mattered that her best friend and confidante was thirteen time zones away. For the first time in years the girl was absolutely sure of what she was going to do with herself after graduation. She had to write, for what else was there?
It's too early to tell, but the girl may yet live happily ever after. She thanks Greek for writing the prompt that eventually helped her to this realization.

This is a guest post from himynameisgusandiscarepeople on Lost Love--and for extra points, she made it audio instead of a written post! Go ahead and listen to it and go tell her hello.