Dear Roger: Who's The One Monkey Loves? Don't You Dare Ask!

My little girl is at that age where she is developing her sense of self and what people mean to her. She has had her first little girl crush on a celebrity and that started very young when she began looking up to Jackson Rathbone as her hero. I don't think she saw him as someone she saw as a cute/romantic type crush at first. He was someone she looked up to as her big brother/replacement male role model since she really didn't have a male role model when she was a little girl. That all changed this past year as she has started to have some hormones kick in and she has been around older girls who have influenced her to see men differently. It was very shocking to me when she first looked at a picture of him and said,"Whoa...hes CUTE!" I actually didn't like hearing her say that. I much preferred her seeing him as someone she looked at as a bit of a hero, that is until he pretty much just dropped out of sight.
That has been rough on her. She has had men do that to her for her entire life. Her big brother was gone for over a year when he went to Texas to live with family. Her father left in 2007 when she was just barely four  for prison due to domestic violence and child abuse. I haven't brought men around or dated because I didn't want that constant daddy of the week experience for her or my boys and she has not had any grandparents around in her life, so her male role models have been a flighty, erstwhile rockstar/actor, her abusive father, and her older brother who has issues of his own, that is until very recently.
Just over a year ago we had a couple move into our apartment complex that I just had a gut feeling about. I knew they were decent, good people and I was determined to become friends with them. Its been a slow progression, but over the last few months we have become very close and good friends and I count them as cherished and needed parts of our family now.
My daughter adores them, in fact all my kids do. We have family game nights with them, dinner together almost every night, and we do things together on an almost daily basis. If they aren't over, they are missed.
My little girl has a crush on them and its cute to watch her light up when they show up at the door. She used to shyly watch them when they would walk their little dog, always careful to stay out of sight, never actually speaking to them but racing to tell me the moment they appeared,"MOM!! THEY ARE OUT THERE IN THEIR PENGUIN JAMMIES TODAY!!"  each and every time they would show up with the dog in the early hours for its morning constitutional.
When they first started coming over for dinner, she sat at the table and didn't speak, she just side-eyed them and blushed, rushing away to go lurk in her room, creeping into the kitchen to get herself a drink and pretend like she wasn't watching them. When she did finally start talking to them, she lit up like a 1000 watt bulb. She joked and teases them, and even flips their gay humor back at them. Its quite cute to see, and they graciously include her in our outings and involve her in many fun things that she has really wanted to do. When they invited her to karaoke, I thought she was going to burst with joy. She has a little girl crush on at least one of them, and he is very aware of it, and he is very careful not to encourage it nor to totally crush her heart. She knows he is gay, she knows what that means, but it still doesn't mean she doesn't absolutely adore him and his partner with all her little girl heart. What is really amazing and wonderful is that he takes time each and every evening to help her with her homework and he is tutoring her in her spelling and penmanship, in other words, spending important time, teaching her important things, and he is a guy who doesn't yell, who doesn't cuss at her, who doesn't cruelly make fun of her, and who most important of all, treats her like an important human being. He gently teases her, and sometimes she gets annoyed and stomps off in an annoyed little hissy fit, and he lets her, because as he reminded me, she doesn't get her way every time.
She jealously guards her time with them and when her brothers come around and want to hang out with the guys or try to horn in on planned outings, she gets angry, and often says,'HEY! Its girl time!', though Stubby is not easily dissuaded because he is very fond of the guys as well and the battles sometimes get pretty dramatic and require intervention.  The guys are gamers and they enjoy talking video gaming with  my eldest and youngest sons, (something my daughter doesn't much care for), and the nights the gaming talk gets prolonged she gets testy and tends to inflict payback on her brothers later, but for the most part, they manage to share the company without much bloodshed and  inflict only psychological harm via payback via Munchkin and hopefully I can keep her convinced to limit the harm to that arena.
I commented to her the other night that she seems to not being paying attention to Jackson so much anymore. I asked her if she replacing him with the guys? That was apparently the WRONG thing to ask. I upset her. I was informed in no uncertain terms that she is not like that, that she does not see people as replaceable or disposable and that she did not find my question to be funny or fair. She informed me that much like I had told her a year ago when the great band schism occurred that I was to quote a lame movie line,"Switzerland" and refusing to choose sides because I loved everyone and could never pick sides in a fight I knew nothing about, she could not simply stop loving or caring for someone simply because they chose to disappear from her life. "I miss him and Ben and Jerad and all of them soo very, very much and if it would do any good I would be on twitter and Facebook every day begging them to come back, but they don't talk to me anymore, they ignore me. Ben is even gone now and Jerad only does weird quotes I don't understand and Jackson said he was going to tour , but then he hasn't  and Ben said he was going to tour but then he quit talking. I just don't know who to believe or listen to anymore. I know that Joel and Chris are here, they talk to me, they tell me they are going to come over and they do. They tell me we are going to go do karaoke and we go. They tell me my birthday isn't going to suck this year and I believe them. I know I am glad I have friends I can trust to talk to me and to tell me the truth and keep their word, they give me hope." Knowing they give my little girl hope makes me love them all the more and makes them among the best men I know.