Love is Hard Work.

Two notes for the moment that I  figured I should write down.  The first, love is hard work, in that love is passionate and mischievous, and addictive, and compulsive, and then, once all of those things exist, it calms down, settles into something else, and that something else will determine whether lovers stay together post-coitus and the period of time around coitus that is so fro-la-la-licking good.  I'm not sure whether two people should be able to combine their visions of each other--that is, stay on the same page--through explicit words, as in they communicate all of their desires all the time and they mostly agree--or whether it should be something less overt, more of a feeling that the relationship is going in a good direction.

There are certainly times doing either option allows a relationship to slide downhill, and there are successful relationships that work either way, too, so perhaps my distinction isn't correct.  Perhaps there is no method for a successful relationship, except for all of the things that allow for successful relations with people generally.    But, if that's all there is--just general niceness, consideration, ability to work, communicate, laugh, etc., then what keeps people together?  What is the bond of love?  I'm not sure that it is fully static--i.e. that once you love someone, the love doesn't require some maintenance of sorts, even though, and here's the trick, I think that's the kind of love we expect from others: we want love that is universal and impermeable to stress, disease, corrosion.  We want someone to love us regardless of what we do.  And that's never, ever, going to happen, even though someone may tell us that they do love us in that way.  Which is why how we communicate, and whether we communicate, about our relationship matters a great deal.  The harder truth is perhaps that we have to keep showing the person we love we are worthy of their love after the drug of initial lust has worn off.

And that's funny. It is funny because, if we had the criteria that a relationship required absent the initial drug-type phase, then we might not pick the same damn partner we ended up picking because of all of our heady emotions.  Which is to say that it is incredibly hard to navigate the field of potential partners and find the one that will work out best in the long term, not because predictions are very difficult, but because we delude ourselves at the early stages of relationships to believe that our emotions are more sincere and more lasting than they might actually be.