Having A Fling - From Shallow to Serious, and Back

It is hard to manage expectations.  That's not a terrible surprise.  What's more interesting is that we lie about our expectations to keep people pleased.

Here's an easy example.  You are having an affair.  However, you are married.  Not only that but the person you're having the affair with is also likewise married.  Whoops.  Now, the trick to the affair, it seems, is to hold some degree of loyalty to each other that carves out a space away from your respective marriages and the obligations those marriages entail.  How to do that?  Well, one way is to tell small lies that signal an intent you might never act on. "We should go away from all of this, get a place of our own" for instance.  That's nice, since it shows that you would prioritize the other person above everything else.  It is also abstract enough to evade in the future. Okay, now the affair is about six months old.  You want to get out of it.  Well, you face a problem, because the person your having the affair with doesn't want to.  How do you break up with that person while shielding your liability?  I'd say you do it incrementally, all the while making excuses, until the flame that was your illicit desire is somewhat quashed and easily disposable.  In this example, of course, the other person holds some liability--after all, they are married too.

But, we don't need to be having an affair  in our example to show opposing intent toward a relationship. All we need to show is relationship that is, oh, let's say, four months old, just enough for there to exist superficial familiarity that masquerades as something else, and for your social life to become enmeshed with this other person.  Now, however, you want out.  Or he/she wants out.  How do you get out?  One alternative is to do it by becoming more and more distant until the other person doesn't want to be in the relationship.  One alternative is to be straight forward and say that you want to break up.  A third alternative is to let the relationship continue to exist until you change your preference for the person.  The third alternative, that is, is one called: hope.   We hope that we change our preference and we lie to ourselves, and the other person, let's say, to keep the agreed upon status of the relationship a certain way until something else happens.  That's funny, because we know our preference and we don't act on it.

Another way of saying that is this: we make small excuses to sacrifice what we feel is true to avoid an unpleasant present, and tell ourselves, all the while, that we will face the unpleasant truths at a later date.  What's interesting to me is that a) we delay facing some truth that is inconvenient to us because it doesn't correspond how we see ourselves and b) that we would prefer at times to sublimate other people's subjective peace with our own.