Love, work, letting things wait

[wispfox]

Those who already read theferret can just ignore this entry. I'm linking to him again!

Love isn't just some ephemeral thing that forms spontaneously and then ticks forever like a perpetual motion machine. Ideally, love makes your life a lot better - I know that I'm a lot happier because of Gini - but it's very rare that two people just click once and never have to talk again. Love, like any other worthwhile thing, involves maintenance.

But nobody writes love songs about maintenance. There are no odes to grouting, or paeans to weekly lawn care. Everyone wants to believe in the effort-free love, because it sure would be nice if it existed, but there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Life is work. Anyone who tells you different is selling you an album..

(Y'know, now I really want someone to write a love song about maintenance.)

And, the addendum, sparked by a comment from his wife zoethe, You need to emphasize, though, that there are times when you visit an issue, realize that both of you are too far apart to resolve it at that point, and let it rest for a while so that one small thing does not get blown out of proportion to the detriment of the rest of the relationship. That was one of the great balancing acts for the two of us - finding the sweet spot between your 'everything must be resolved at once!' and my 'here's a nice rug to sweep it under.'

Comments

made me want to rant on the subject

[ommango.livejournal.com]

Seems like love songs are about the first 15 minutes (o.k., maybe a few months. When you desire someone strongly, you put them on a pedestal, and your attraction is based on projections to as what you think the other person is, not who they really are. So love songs are about infatuation which can be a mental affliction and distortion of reality. Love is more about what happens long after after repeated times of working through conflict and learning to live harmoniously and despite the fact that they are not the person you assumed they were.

[beowabbit]

Interestingly, T's and my relationship seemed effortlessly smooth for the first five years or so, despite major external stresses (Housemates from Hell, money problems) and what would have been internal stresses in another relationship (the end of our sexual relationship, for instance). It felt like everything just worked itself out with no conscious effort and not even very much conscious attention. That was lovely, but when we got to a point where we did need to do the maintenance, I think it left us much less prepared/competent than we would otherwise have been. It was unfamiliar (in that relationship; we'd each done lots of processing in other relationships) and therefore scary, and we didn't have the skills for doing that kind of work in that relationship. So it took a while to develop them, and we were developing them under pressure. I think it would have been better if we'd gotten to develop our processing skills together from the start.

[phaedra-lari.livejournal.com]

The scariest thing is that it can be *so* hard to tell the difference between growing-pains/hard-work-needed kinda problems, and problems that indicate things need to end.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Yes. It can.

Which is, I suspect, a large part of why I don't know _anyone_ who has left at the time when, looking back on stuff, they first started getting clear indications that they should...

[phaedra-lari.livejournal.com]

Yes, I don't think there is any way to avoid that happening, other than not being willing to face the struggles... which is no kind of solution if you want at some point a relationship that *will* work.

*sigh*