Men who affirm a woman's right to decide for herself and set goals for herself while recognizing that she hasn't been given the means to pull it off and who are willing and able to provide just enough support for her to have a reasonable hope of succeeding by her own efforts are extraordinarily rare. Not because men are all monsters or because they are all misogynists but because that's just a really hard thing to do successfully and most men likely have no idea it's what women need.
I believe this is the crux of what Jack did for me in allowing me to remain in his social circle after realizing I was deathly ill and celibate for medical reasons and would likely be so for many more years, so there was no real hope of getting together.
It was a more loving thing to do for me than what most people will ever get from anyone who is sexually attracted to them. I have a genetic disorder and sleeping with me and marrying me to take care of me would have killed me. Not doing so meant watching me struggle to survive and barely scrape by for many years while refusing to give me the easy out of marrying a rich man for his money whom I was in love with.
And I respected his decision and wasn't angry at him about it though the entire thing made me want to spit nails.
In high school, I read a short story about an alien woman stranded on earth who looked human except her physical temperature was crazy low such that it wasn't safe to touch her. They keep her in Antarctica waiting for a ship to come get her and in the months she is there, she falls in love with a human man whom she can never touch.
Her shop shows up and just before she leaves, standing outside in the cold she pulls his glove off and presses his hand to her face, burning herself and giving him frostbite.
And that's my relationship to Jack, minus the part where they got to touch just once in spite of knowing it would egregiously harm them both.
He gave me space to grow and refused to fill that empty space in my life so I had it for myself to occupy and grow into.
I don't know if it will ever result in me being able to adequately support myself financially but I'm not dead and I'm healthier than I've ever been and some portion of that is his doing.
At the end of the movie The Crying Game, Fergus frames himself for the murder Dil committed and goes to prison for it. He does so to take responsibility for what he did to Dil's life before he ever met her and to make amends.
She visits him in prison, all enamored. She's trans and he threw up after learning that about her, having just been intimate with her. He doesn't want her and isn't in love with her.
He says something rebutting the idea that he loves her and she replies "You're doing time for me. What greater love can there be?"
Jack is Dutch. I'm American.
Maybe he just thinks he was being polite but it's a big deal to me because I live in the third world country of Merika where we treat women like chattel property and pretend we don't.
Whatever his reason, may he go in peace. I don't write about him to drag him nor to tell him I still love him, though I do.
Just not in the way I once did where I imagined what I felt should involve sex and marriage and maybe a baby carriage.
He helped me breathe while the rest of the world tried to suffocate me. How can I not have some kind of strong positive feelings for him though I've never met him and don't expect that I ever will?
Maybe love isn't the right word. I prefer the words deep respect for what I feel.
But I know the rest of planet Earth, should anyone read this, will leap to the idea "She's still in love with him!"
So I feel some need to address that in some way without denying that he was important to me and I still hold him in high esteem and I can't imagine anything will ever change that.
This piece is not really about Jack. It's about space to grow, like the title says.