Relationships

A guy meets a girl, they find each other interesting, go out together for a while, all's rosy and amazing for three months, and then suddenly they meet other guys and girls, and everything's over, usually with one big heartbreak.

Two people studying in the same school/college get interested in each other, get to know each other better, talk about everything (including spending the rest of their lives together), stay together for a few years, and then the illusion evaporates for one or both of them.

Or maybe the exact opposite happens.. maybe things DO work out after all and they (as Baz Luhrmann would like to say) dance the funky chicken at their 75th wedding anniversary. The question is, how do you KNOW until you've TRIED?

One thing, of course, is to go extremely slowly. Know the person for a year or two, their ins and outs, their goals/ambitions/desires/adaptability/mumbo-jumbo, and then decide whether to be together or not. This might work for some people, but then it isn't really falling in love.. its more like putting all the variables into some goddamn equation for horizontal and vertical velocity and factoring in the hardness of the place you're about to land in. It formalizes love, makes it a calculated gamble instead of the wild, growing, mutually nurturing thing it should be.

That obviously doesn't mean that you end up going out with every random stranger you meet.. but you also don't need to know every small detail to even think about a person seriously. After all... hope is a good thing, maybe even the best of things...

"You're afraid of me! You're afraid that I won't love you back! Fuck it, I wanna give it a shot! At least I'm honest with you. " - Minnie Driver in Good Will Hunting

That just about sums up a very common attitude towards relationships... fear of rejection or of the fact that things won't work out. Well, what if they don't? You'll be hurt, sure... perhaps you gave your 110% but things still didn't work out...then what? Is it all over? Is life done with? Most importantly, was that time wasted?

My answer to this is NO. After all, what is life but the sum of the experiences you've had while you lived? Its the journey which matters, because everyone's destination is the same. A bond which lasted a few years and then ended was not a waste of those years. Instead, in all probability, it made both parties evolve into better people, and enriched their lives in a way that only they could, for each other. As Lord Tennyson would put it, its always better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.

Lastly, of course, there are moments. Things that no one can ever steal away from you... the most special things that people do together... be it walking together down a moonlit beach or just having an ice cream fight... these are things that no one can EVER take away from a person, no matter what happens. And in the end, these are probably ALL that count. After all, life isn't about the number of breaths you take, but about the moments that take your breath away....