The longevity of your relationship not only makes you aware of what you want, but also about what you don’t want, in your significant other. The number of years you invest is the perfect yardstick to measure the possibility of you signing the dotted line on a legal sheet of paper that will bind you two forever, by god and by man. But it’s okay if you think that all the time you spent with a person cannot result in marriage. You signed no deal before getting into it, right?
We grow up, priorities change, that’s life.
Love should not mean the end of your dreams. In fact, you need to be a happy, content person, for your relationship with another to work. So as long as the compromises you make doesn’t mean the death of your aspirations and life plans, it’s fine. But sacrifices are a big deal. If you’re ready to make a big change and give up something completely, congrats on finding someone you are ready to take the leap for. But if that’s not the case, then I guess there’s a lot of talking you need to do. It is okay to want different things from life or for you to want the same thing at one point and then change, because that is growing up. Tough, but that’s how it is.
Sometimes, you’re just in love with the idea of being in love.
Yeah, that happens too. The notion of love fed to us by fairy-tale romances in movies, where guy meets girl and it’s all just too perfect has confused us to the point where we look for that idea of perfect in our lives. As Dylan sings, ‘To gather flowers constantly and come each time you call‘ is not be something that happens, everybody has a life. It might just happen that you get over the person along with the honeymoon phase of your relationship. And if you prolong a relationship with this knowledge, you are simply wasting your time.
Love disappeared, slowly, like baby teeth. Like losing parts of me I thought I needed.
Like an amateur magician, everyone could see the trap door, but me. Like a flat tyre, there were other places I had planned to go, but my plans didn’t matter.
-When Love Arrives by Sarah Keys and Phil Kaye
Sometimes, you grow out of love. It does not mean what you had wasn’t real.
Had there been a rulebook that charts out human emotions, decision making wouldn’t have been a skill. But that’s not how it is. You might be head over heels in love with a person, might even think that he or she is the one you want to spend your life with, but even those ideas can change, just like your priorities. Isn’t it better to realise and understand things, rather than let the other person be with someone you know does not love them? How is that even fair?
It’s alright to not know why you don’t want to marry him or her either.
Nobody has ever been able to understand how chemistry works, but if the flavour of the relationship is over, it just is. This however, does not mean that small lull in the relationship where things just begin to look monotonous. That’s going to happen anyway, no matter who you’re with. Which is why it’s (um…) recommended that companionship is a necessity in relationships. But if things just don’t look promising in the long run, stop. Don’t be in the pity dating game, where you’re just there to not break a person’s heart.
The choice has to be yours, not just about the conventional way of things.
Don’t just drag things all the way to marriage because that’s how things have been for the longest time. Be thankful that you have the option of seeing and dating a person- it’s there for the whole purpose of helping you find out whether you want to be with a person or not. It’s your chance to see if things can turn out well in the long run. Please realise that some things become too complicated to undo once done. Like marriage, so let’s not be hasty, yeah?
Chemistry can be a bitch…
…not just time. Not in every case, but people have pursued people, and once they got them to go down on bended knee, they have run for cover. It’s a balm to the ego when you win their heart, which is something you realise after you are way into the eye of the storm, passing through events as the tornado leads you. It’s next to impossible to demarcate feelings because human needs are way too intertwined with emotions. If you’re in such a pickle, please don’t follow it through. Apologise, wish them the best, and pray that karma behaves well with you.
But please don’t stay there.
The course of true love never did run smooth, Shakespeare said. So finding that one person is going to be a tough road. Rather than barge into a marriage to realise you aren’t happy, it’s better to not push or hurry. Be patient, your love will arrive. It’s never been a forced guest anyway.
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