You meet someone. You feel something. You know they feel it, too.
One day, there’s The Conversation.
Where are we? she asks.
What do you mean? you respond, even though you know exactly what she’s asking. If you don’t say now what she wants to hear, it’s over.
But you want to say what she wants you to, so you say it, and just like that — you enter the Relationship.
Exclusive. Monogamous. Mutual.
Welcome, stranger. It’s fun here.
Months go by. You move in together. You get used to each other’s company. You build your life around each other’s quirks and weaknesses — and you devise a working-from-home schedule that makes sense for both of you.
You travel.
You meet each other’s parents.
Friends. Colleagues.
You exchange location on your phones.
You learn to take a shit in each other’s presence.
She likes your parents, but that’s not mutual.
You like her parents and know her father likes you too but will never show it.
In Year 2, you start having problems. It’s nothing big. She won’t clean up after herself and hates cooking. You’d prefer she didn’t wear that shirt publicly, but you were too much of a feminist to mention it.
She thinks your cleaning habit is OCD. You hope she realizes that dentists exist for a reason.
You have The Fight.
Then another one.
Then, several months in, one more. This time, a big one. Nasty. She says things, and so do you.
You both remember it all too well afterwards.
You take a break. You go abroad. You meet people. You don’t get too entangled with anyone, but there are a few people you fancy. You start to wonder.
What if…
… you never met her, never moved in together, broke up.
You wonder if you ever recover from the fight.
Somehow, miraculously, you do.
You come back. You give it another shot.
It’s going well.
But then, before you know it, it’s over.
The love isn’t there, as if it never was.
The friends you made together won’t return your calls.
She left and took your favourite spoon with her.
You stayed and secretly wished she would get ill and realized how much she needed you.
For several months, you walk in a zombie-like state, vowing never to fall into this trap again.
Relationships, ugh.
You work out. You work. You get drunk. You buy stuff you don’t need.
Months go by.
And then you meet Her.
Not her, but Her.
Someone else.
You feel it. You know they feel it, too.
The cycle repeats itself.
After a few rounds of this, you can’t help but ask yourself.
Is it even worth it?
If all is well, that ends well, then if the relationship turns into shit — does it mean there wasn’t anything there to begin with?
I thought all you needed to make a relationship work was to love a person.
I was wrong.
Love is important. In a drunk game I once played, someone asked me, “Would you rather pick loving someone but not being loved back or being loved but not loving them?”
I would choose the former every time.
Because love is a verb. Because feeling it is worth everything, and that is the whole point.
Being with someone you don’t love is torture and simply dishonest.
But—
love is not enough.
I used to think it was. How many times a girl would dump me, and I would scream, “But I love you!” — as if that was the argument that would somehow make things better, patch us back like broken pieces of a vase.
The truth is that too many people love each other but can’t be together, and too many people don’t love each other but somehow get along.
Where I am from, most couples over 45 are examples of that. They are together, well, just “because”. I am sure this is universal across most cultures.
As I see it now, the problem with many of my failed relationships was that if love was present, that was all there was.
We weren’t friends; we weren’t soulmates. The relationship built only on love feels amazing, but it’s also on thin ice.
Something else must hold it all together.
Companionship? Respect? Same values? Kids, mortgages, obligations, commitments?
In other words, it is the stuff that takes time. Stuff that’s not handed out for free.
Stuff that takes work.
Because if love comes — or doesn’t — on its own, everything else in a relationship is gained.
Just because you have love doesn’t necessarily mean you have everything else.
You must work to become compatible, try to become friends, and have something beyond love that will keep you together in sad, short-lived moments when love fails.
And those moments will come. Oh god, they will.
And when they do, the only real question is — can you be loving when there’s no love to be felt?
That’s the juice.
That’s the work.
And that’s the test.