So I'm thinking...

Next week, I celebrate three years together with my partner and recent disagreements, sensitivities and insensitivities made me wonder about how we got this point, why is it that I feel like we are still in love. You start going out with someone and it feels like you want to celebrate every week. Then once you hit that month mark, you start celebrating every month. Once you hit that year mark, you start celebrating the years toegether...Here begin the problems. What I want you to do is notice the timeframe between the week celebrations, the month celebrations and the year celebrations. What I want you to notice and analyze, is the transition between each time sequence. Between the week celebrations, what the two of you have together is still exciting. You can't for the 7 days to go by and then to eventually say that you've been together for a month. Once this hits, your excitement grows into periods of impatience, moments where you will feel that things might be moving too slow. You start thinking about other decisions that you might wanna make together, like should your parents know about your partner, should your partner be allowed into your home yet or do you still see him in the stranger definition and of course, last but not least, sex. You know that if you get jiggy with it too early, things might spiral out of control. Your expectations might be so high that the night you two have sex, the only people getting off that night will be the people outside getting off of the bus. Your expectations might be so low that you have no hope at all for this experience and not even see the point in giving your full potential to this relationship. So where should your expectations be? Where is this middle ground that the love guru speaks of? How do you know if your middle ground matches your partner's middle ground? It's a constant game of compromise and it is exhausting. People refuse to communicate and by that, I don't mean they don't talk. They do, but in a way to make sure that they are right, that the other is wrong, that they put the other down if necessary. It's a modern form of colonization and a lot of relationships tend to go in that direction. What happens is that because of previously mentioned impatience, which can lead to boredom and frustration, one partner will find ways to make the relationship interesting, to keep it going, to make it last, to exploit it for their own benefit. What happens then is you have the girl who tells you that he is now "official" with the guy he's been after for ages, that their relationship has actually been notarized now. You get the girl who refuses to let go because she truly believes that their relationship will get better even though he has told her that he doesn't love her. You get the guy who stays with the girl not because he likes her, but because he's afraid for her. He's afraid of what might happen if her breaks up with her...Whatever happened to that time, celebrating two weeks together?...It turned into a year and without realizing it, you're going on two, three even. Time flies and our expectations are running at the same time that we forget to live in that moment where you're happy. You start making assumptions and generalizations about an entire future based on one event. If he does this, then it's going to lead to that. If she does that, then it's going to lead to this..Why are you so afraid to be wrong? Why are you so afraid to just have fun as it was meant to be? Our parents will tell us undoubtedly that there are a series of steps that have to be followed when getting into a relationship. But they lived a much less stressful life. There is a way for us to do the same now. One of the main points of a relationship is that when you come home, you know that both of you have had their share of problems and what makes them bearable is that you know your partner will be there for you. After the exciting weeks and the impatient months and the frustrating years, your partner will become the cane that holds you up when the stress on you is simply too much.