Hello all,
December just introduced me to this thread. I was getting wordy in The Great Debate ... It's nice to know that long posts are welcomed here!
Visitor wrote:The knowledge that Bella has a Plan B while he does not has to scare him sometimes. It would scare me. Sure Edward chose to love Bella. He made the choices necessary to get him to the point of love. So technically, he should have to live with the consequences (whatever they may be) of falling in love with a human. He knew at the start of TW how fickle human love was. He said so himself on numerous occasions. So Bella's Plan B, her other soul mate, the idea of it . . . should not be surprising.
In order to jump into the thick of it all, I'm going to try to focus on this quote from
Visitor. I should preface this with saying that I'm on Team Edward, but I can understand Jacob's draw.
My innate human selfishness comes out when talking about Bella's "Plan B." Why? I cannot look past the possibility of Jacob imprinting on someone else down the road. Even if it occurs 50 years from the time they get together, and they have the white picket fence and little Jacob-Bella babies life together, it still could. And the possibility of this makes me afraid, and would make me terrified were I in Bella's shoes.
Jacob tells Bella, and many of you have touched on this in this thread, that choosing him would be keeping her humanity (essentially). However, this humanity comes with hurt, pain and loss. This humanity comes with the option of losing your soul-mate to another. Sure, humanity comes with good food, having children and growing old, but something inside of me just can't put that above having someone being eternally and utterly dedicated to you.
(I know that's not quite what Visitor was talking about, but she did bring up the idea of Plan B.)
I just wrote a whole bunch about Bella's choices between the Plan A and Plan B ... but then I realized it was turning into a "Who's Better" thread, and I didn't want to start my time here out that way. So, instead, I pose to you something to think about.
I just started re-reading
Twilight, as I tore through TW, NM and Ec in a record three nights. I promised myself I would take it a little slower this time and think about things more, which is probably due to the Lex's influence.

In the very first or second chapter (I'll post the exact quote later when I have my book within arm's reach) Bella thinks about how she's never fit in anywhere. Yet, she immediately finds a family with the Cullens, even though she=human and they=vampire. I believe, and even though SM doesn't say anything in particular about this, that this sense of finally belonging has a huge influence on Bella's choices. Humans tend to latch on to things that they find comfort in, and after 18 years, I'm certain Bella would find comfort in the fact that she'd found a family, not just a lover, to belong to.
I really hope this ties into what y'all have been talking about in the last 50+ pages ... *fingers crossed*
ETA:
As for Edward's choices, he obviously had one at the beginning of
Twilight, even though I'm sure it would have felt like death had he not chosen what he did. He chose to come back from Alaska to be with Bella. Someone here mentioned the "If I'm going to hell, I might as well go all the way" earlier (Sorry, I can't recall who it was). The choice I'm sure what hard. On the one side, he had: Be in love with Bella, which could have ended up with: She's in love with me too, or she's not. On the other: Live life of solitude, being broody and depressed for ever more because I stayed true to my vampire ways and didn't bring Bella into my difficult life.
Even though he made a difficult choice, I think it was the best (and possibly easiest) choice for him to make. Easy in the sense that it's easier to give yourself over to love than to fight it (like Bella with Jacob in Ec?). Hard in the sense that he was essentially giving the rest of his life to someone who could stomp it to pieces in return. Luckily for him, it turned out for the better.
I think that since it turned out for the better in the first place, Edward would never go back on that choice. Vampires don't seem to waffle. I think he's perfectly satisfied with the few "moments" of happiness he got, that even if things don't work out in the end, he would think he'd made the right choice.
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