Kathy and Dave found in each other empathetic sounding boards for their troubled. first marriages and courage to form a new life together. In both cases, Kathy and Dave chose to avoid a remarriage by leaving their first marriages and forming a new relationship with one another. Dave and his wife filed their divorce papers just two months after he met Kathy. Eventually, Kathy decided to leave her abusing husband and with Dave’s help moved all of her belongings into a rented truck with the intention of moving in with her mother. When they reached her mother’s house, Dave asked Kathy: “Why don’t you just move in with me? We can give it a try and if it doesn’t work out, I will help you move your things again to your mother’s house.” Kathy accepted his proposal without hesitation and began thereafter living with Dave.
The process of moving in together for Kathy and Dave signified in their minds more than anything else their unity as a couple. They say they fell in love almost instantaneously after the first time they spoke to each other at the steak house. She said she felt secure in talking with him, not at all afraid that he may turn out to be a abuser like her husband. He said he found in her someone who was sympathetic to his needs, who took time to listen to him instead of taking his presence for granted.
The negative feelings associated with Ben and Karen’s meeting were not the result of ghosts from previous relationships, as was the case with Kathy and Dave. Rather, the emotions were much more direct and immediate: neither Ben nor Karen liked each other very much when they first met. Ben recalls that:
I was going to play frisbee with a friend of mine who was this nymphomaniac type of person and we were going to go out after school and I was meeting him in the student union at the college and he was talking to Karen and came over to me and said, “well, I’m going to go to the beach instead,” and that pissed me off — I mean with this hippie-chick sitting there on the
lawn. . .
Karen notes that it was raining that day.
