I hate to start off like this, but think about your local ice cream parlour.  Now think about all of the options of creamy, yummy iced happiness (or for you lactose intolerant readers, imagine colourful frozen yogurt).  Imagine yourself trying to choose amongst the flavours.  It’s hard, isn’t it?  There’s mint chocolate chip or strawberry or chocolate chip cookie dough or peanut butter chunk or even…  The possibilities are endless and they are all very tasty in their own ways.  Trying to decide what you want most of all is tough even when the stakes are small, or for those of you less interested in iced desserts, the stakes are non-existent.

Even if you always get the exact same flavour when you step out for an ice cream cone, you still have a problem.  It’s a different problem.  But on the other hand, it’s sort of the same problem, once this metaphor moves from iced cream to men (or women).  When you walk into the iced cream shop, you are expecting your favourite flavour to be a) available to purchase and b) just as good (if not better) than how you remember it.  Imagine you are on vacation and you step into an unfamiliar iced cream store and find that your favourite flavour isn’t available.  Or worse, that the rocky road ice cream in this store is nowhere near as good as the rocky road you’re used to eating.  In either circumstance, you wind up disappointed.

Choosing Means Living With Your Possibilities

When you chose some thing over another thing, or some man over another man, you are picking from one or more possibility and effectively deciding to be happy with the one you choose.  Now when it comes to iced cream, will the world end if you pick Dutch chocolate and then you regret not having vanilla?  The answer, my friends, is a resounding “no.”  You’ll survive.

You will still have to live with your decision, but in the grand scheme of the universe and everything, choosing one possibility over the other in the ice cream debate isn’t life altering.  Choosing one woman over another, on the other hand, could very well be.

When you make a decision you have to live with all of the possibilities you left behind without letting them overwhelm your life.  It’s learning how not to obsess over the flavours you didn’t pick that will allow you to appreciate what you have.  That can be tougher than it sounds.