The one that got away?

I was reading Busty Satan's post about finding out on Facebook that an ex-boyfriend is now married, and it got me thinking about past relationships, first loves, all that jazz.

I only know of one guy that I've dated who is married now. Souley, the man I dated while I was living in Senegal. As I said in my comment on BS's post, I found out a couple years after I moved back to the US that he had married a French woman and they had a daughter together.

By the time I found out about this, I was already dating Torsten and I was long since over Souley. I thought of him with fondness and wondered how he was doing, but I didn't miss him and I didn't miss being with him. I knew that a long-term relationship with him would never have worked out, and I had no regrets. So, when I heard that he was married with a child, I was mostly happy for him.

The one thing that gave me pause was the fact that his wife was French. The woman Souley dated before me was Dutch, and white. Their relationship was long-term and very serious. I didn't think too much about it, at the time. Two foreign girlfriends could be totally coincidental.

But three? Three stops seeming like a coincidence to me. Three starts seeming like a pattern. Three foreign women (and I am presuming, though I don't know for sure, that his French wife is white) starts to seem like a desire for a change. A desire for a visa, more specifically.

Maybe I'm jaded, because when I was in Senegal I received marriage proposals from strange men on the street pretty much every single day, and many of them were quite up-front about wanting a white wife who could get them a visa and a ticket out of Senegal. This isn't some paranoia in my head. I am always generally skeptical of relationships between Senegalese men and white foreign women for this reason. Souley seemed like an exception to me, especially since we had discussed at the beginning of our relationship the fact that it would end when I moved back to the US. We agreed. That was the plan. And we stuck to it. So I didn't see any ulterior motives.

But now, with the third foreign woman in a row? I don't know anymore. I suspect that he was looking for a foreign woman. I suspect that part of the reason why he even noticed me to begin with had to do with the fact that I was white, foreign, American, rich (relatively speaking). I don't think that's the whole reason. I don't think you can fake five months of being in love the way we were at the time. But I think it was probably a factor.

But the thing is? It doesn't matter. We had a great relationship. We really enjoyed each other. We cared about each other. We walked away from that relationship both feeling fulfilled and happy. My memories of my time with him are positive. And now I've moved on, and so has he.

Maybe he wanted a foreign wife. Maybe that's part of why he dated me. But that doesn't change the fact that we were good together, we had fun together, we supported each other.

Maybe I'm a subjectivist, but if we both look back on our relationship positively, and we've both moved on and are now happy with other people, having found what we wanted... does it matter why he was interested in me in the first place? Does it matter why I was interested in him?

I don't think it does.