This week I learned something. I was going to stay quiet, but have very often heard after the fact “I wish someone had told me.” (However when someone told me, I didn’t listen.) A friend just began dating a woman who I know the past 20 years to be other than what she seems. A mutual friend told me “the news” and joked, “he must have just come into an inheritance.”  That triggered me.  She’s smart, pretty and charismatic, and as long as the dollars are flowing, all is well. She has overlapping relationships and at the first argument over “can you please pay your own bills,” her partners are left devastated, emotionally and financially. I stopped and asked for guidance, to be able to look at it in a way that respected everyone’s path and choices and helped me determine my responsibility, if any, to my friend.  I wasn’t judging his choice, Just wanting it to be an informed choice, like getting a Carfax before a pre-owned car purchase.  The heart wants what the heart wants, and there’s nothing like the shakti rush of new infatuation.   Plus his future experience doesn’t have to be the same as anyone else’s past experience.

I was well aware that one possible consequence could be my friend cutting me off, as I did BH (she didn’t understand!) in 2011 when she gave me honest counsel about my ex.  After consideration, I wrote my friend, “… knowing (your new girlfriend) many years, I wish you happiness. I feel a responsibility to tell you that she can be a very caring and kind person who does not set out to take advantage of partners financially however there is a history of it. I’ve not spoken to her in a couple of years, it could very well be she has broken that pattern. It could also be that I’m out of line telling you this but if you were my brother, I couldn’t not let you know what I know. Bless you in this joining.”  He responded with a heart symbol, which I took to mean he read what I wrote and knew it came from my heart.

Elizabeth Stamper reminded me, “We never know what other people’s karma is and what powerful lessons they may be ready for, and what a teacher someone can be for them.”
For us. For me.