8/15/00
RELATIONSHIPS
1 PAGE

I'm not the premier person to aask about this, because I've only been in one really longterm relationship and it was something that I knew wasn't real love for a long time and wanted to get out of but didn't know how. But this is how i see it or picture how it will be or should be for ME...

Bascially, the beginning of a relationship is always very exciting because it's still new and EVERYTHING about it is a new discovery. A new method of kissing, a new smell, a new voice, a new laugh, a new like/dislike list... discovery is exciting, so the beginning of a relationship is ALWAYS exciting because you are discovering new things about each other. The only time this may not neccessarily be true is for people who were friends for a long time first. Because you've essentially already learned a lot of stuff about the other person so it's not like EVERYTHING is a discovery. But it's still exciting because you are in a new phase of the relationship. You are doing things that you weren't doing before. Mainly physical things like kissing and holding hands in public, but still new discoveries.

Now, the reason people end up getting divorces a lot of times, especially when they're young is because they decide to get married during this initial phase, where everythng is still new. The way Laura put it to me is that you love a whole lotta aspects of the person and then fill in what you don't know from your imagination and fantasies. Well that's dangerous because eventually you're going to find out that you were wrong in at least a couple of your fantasies. And that's when you're going to realize that you don't necessarily like those aspects of the otehr person and your fantasy has been shattered.

So I think the whole courtship phase needs to go on for at least a couple years so that you have plenty of time to figure out if you can live with the negative aspects of the other person: Can you tolerate them snoring, do you like what they look like without makeup, do you still want to hold them even when their deoderant has run out at the end of the day and they are too exahusted to take a shower, stuff like that. Because true love means you will still love this person unconditionally even when they aren't at their best.

So there is going to be a point at which teh "honeymoon phase" ends. Where the person isn't wearing cologne and trying to look their best for the person all the time. But at the same time, some people get too lazy. It always used to bug me when my ex woiuld wear her hair up in a bun. She didn't look good like that. She started wearing sweats and baggy clothes all the time and putting her hair up. How hard is it to just leve the hair in a pony tail and put on jeans and a shirt? But it was like she went out of her way to make herself look ugly. It's fine once in awhile, but when every day she just looks bad, it's like saying she doesn't have enough love for HERSELF to look presentable. And another friend has said that once you get comfortable in a relationship, you let your body go all plump and everything. That's just being lazy.

Personally, i would want to stay sexy for the woman I loved. I'd want her to wake up every morning and be happy in every way that she's with me. Of course she'll love me unconditionally, but I want her to be able to "show me off" to her friends. So it IS okay to look your worst, because there are days that you just don't have the energy to look any better. But when you just allow everyday to add to you not putting in the effort, that's when you run into problems. That's when the spark starts to die, because you can't even gear yourself up to do good for yourself, how can you do good for another person. Laziness spreads. If you allow yourself to be lazy constatnly in one facet of your life, it'll spread to other facets.