Question of the Week: The Stuff of Dreams

You have the chance to meet someone with whom you can have the most satisfying love imaginable--the stuff of dreams. Sadly, you know that in six months the person will die. Knowing the pain that would follow, would you still want to meet the person and fall in love? What if you knew your lover would not die, but instead would betray you?

We've stumbled into a Nicholas Sparks novel. As someone who has never really been in love and never had that kind of love returned, it will be easy for me to fall back on that cliche. "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." Since I've never experienced that kind of loss, then I have no idea how much pain that would cause.

But the point of these questions is that they're hypothetical. They're supposed to make you think. How would you handle the situation, it doesn't matter if you have something to compare it to or not. So I'm gonna say I'd go for the love. Why not? I think if I was the one about to die, I'd like to spend my last six months in a true love situation. And if the girl I'm with is about to die, then I would hope I could play some role in making her last days on earth as happy as possible. Yeah, it would hurt when she dies, but eventually the grief would subside and I'd be able to look back on those six months that we were able to be together.

If it's the betrayal thing, rather than death, I'd avoid the relationship. Trust is something that's really hard to build. And people tend to avoid future relationships if they are betrayed in the past. I wouldn't want to lose faith in all women just because of one stupid girl's lack of integrity. So that's my answer. Yes and no.

*Question of the Week comes from The Book of Questions by Gregory Stock, Ph.D.