A few weeks (maybe months) ago my wife asked me if I had been contacted as of late by a former female friend of mine (we’ll call her Gina). I told my wife that I had indeed received an email from her a few weeks prior to that. I also mentioned that I had responded to that email basically as a response to the “How have you been?” query.

At the time I was kind of put under the gun for this interaction. My wife asked me a few other questions that I honestly could not answer in a way that would have been satisfactory at that time. Some of the questions were:

1. “Why would a married woman make contact with a married man just to see how he is doing?”
2. “Why would a married man reply to a contact from a married woman?”
3. “Do you think it is spiritually wise to maintain any type of relationship with someone with whom you have had a relationship?”

When I was asked these questions I could not come up with an answer that I thought was satisfactory for her so when she stated that she knew women and that women almost always have an ulterior motive for making contact with a married man, I could not argue.

At the same time as this conversation I had asked my wife if she ever attempted to contact my former boss, we’ll call him Tom, with whom she had had an emotional affair a few years ago. She said that she would not contact him because she knew what that would do to our relationship. She said she was also a little concerned with me not seeing this topic as she did.

As such, I made one last contact with Gina by way of email to tell her that I could not have any further contact with her because it was not appropriate for a married man to have contact with a married woman who was not his wife. Seeing as my wife had made her position very clear, it seemed like it was the logical thing to do.

Fast forward to last night. While sitting on the couch with my wife she asked me if I had heard from or made contact with Tom recently. I told her that I hadn’t as there has been no real reason to contact him. That was about the end of that.

Now to today. A short while ago my wife called me to tell me that she had sent Tom an email and that, to make communicating easier, that she just called him instead. She was able to catch up on a lot of stuff from the past months and was able to share with him a lot of stuff from her life over the past few months.

However I was a tad concerned about this little experience. I should probably attempt to clarify my position on this a little bit because if I don’t I will come across as a jealous, controlling freak and the truth is I am not.

I used to work for Tom. I actually worked for him from 1999 until 2006 when I left. Before that I worked with him from 1997 to 1999 (it was in 1999 that he became my manager).

During this time he showed a tremendous amount of generosity toward me and my family, even putting my wife to work a few times to help us earn a little extra income. It was during this time that my wife began a long flirtatious relationship with Tom that included phone calls and emails.

In 2002 things had gotten to a point where Sandi, my wife, would actually bypass visiting me at work (we all worked in the same department) so she could go see him. She would spend quite a bit of time emailing and calling him. It even got to the point, I found out recently, that they had even asked the question “What do you think would happen if we ever, you know?”.

So when my told me a few months ago that she would not ever contact him and that, if he ever contacted her, she would simply no reply, I thought it was a bold, strong stance to take. But I guess that has changed somewhere in the last few months.

Part of the conversation we had a few months ago dealt with soul ties. Specifically ungodly soul ties. The kind of soul ties that keep a person bound to a past experience and do not allow that person to move forward from that experience. According to my wife allowing relationships that derive from a past soul tie to propagate could ultimately allow for the destruction of current relationships because of the stuff that comes to the current from the former. That actually made sense to me.

When I asked her about that a few minutes she told me that “as long as you don’t have the same intentions as before then keeping the relationship is OK”. That would have been nice to know a few months ago when I told Gina that I could not talk to her anymore.

Of course, now that the whole issue of past soul ties is mute I am for sure going to ask Gina’s forgiveness for kicking her to the curb and see if she would ever be willing to call me a friend again. And as I think of it there is at least one other person that I would love to find out their current life status. That person is a former friend of mine by the name of Connie Castro.

Connie was a former (junior) high school crush of mine who also happened to be a very dear friend. The last I saw of her was way back in 1993. I had never really tried to make contact with her because I knew that it would make things really bad in my marriage because of how my wife felt about former relationships. But since that is now a non-issue I can see myself doing some Google searching for my long lost friend. I would be really interested to see how Connie is doing.

I am sure there are going to be other people that I could think of touching base with again. Danielle Hornberger from college, David Watkins from High School, Matthias Stephen from College, John Zung from college.

I just feel so liberated now. I feel set free to be able to rekindle past friendships with people that until today were considered too taboo to be friends with anymore.

And I hope Sandi has a great time reconnecting with Tom. Yes, they have a relationship that would make you think they were both single. But I guess that is the way things go with them. As for me, I am just happy to know that I am free to look up some of my long lost friends and I cannot wait to start that search.