love and fear

Whilst having a conversation with my sister, I sort of had an epiphany about love and relationships.  I was saying to her that the lesson that I’ve learned from my breakup with S is that nothing lasts, even if you both love each other a great deal and once you let go of your fear of that fact you can enjoy what you have at the time and make the best of it (that of course does not make it hurt like hell any less when it does end).

So from there I sort of then thought about how people are when they first meet. You don’t quite know each other in the first few months to a year, you’re feeling a lot of emotions be it love, intense like, lust and you want to keep this person with you (because at this stage nothing is ‘secure’) so you express what you’re feeling through actions, through deeds, you make an effort to impress this person, to show them how much you love and want to be with them. Actions such as presents, romantic dinners, weekends away, sexy nights in, telephone calls, little messages, flowers, whatever it is.

But once you’re more or less ‘secure’ in your relationship in that you are now living together and have sort of become each other’s other half, you let the ball drop as such, you stop expressing how you feel about this person that you love, you stop expressing your love in actions. Now it happens maybe a few times a year and on special occasions. Now you’ve taken to just saying ‘I love you’… and the more you say it, the more it loses the impact it once had because you’re not backing it up with actions. You’re not making this person feel loved, you’re not giving energy to this person the way you did in the first beginnings.

This is why relationships end in my opinion… because you go in search of those beginning times which you will find with someone new no doubt even if you know you’re leaving possibly one of the greatest loves you will ever have had… because we succumb to the mundaness of life, to the petty day to day things, we get lazy and take who we have for granted that they will be there in the morning. It isn’t so. So, this is what I have learned… I know that common sense tells us that we should never take our partners for granted, but it happens nonetheless.  Keep expressing your love in actions. Words mean nothing if your actions or lack of actions are contradicting what you are feeling and saying.  I had to learn this the hard lonely way.

Nothing is guaranteed, it can still end… nothing lasts even if you do and not just say, it depends on whether the other is also doing and not just saying. I know, not the most eloquent of epiphanies… but it makes sense in my head and thought I would try to share this.  As much as I felt secure in my relationship with S I also feared that she would leave me for someone better, someone who made her feel more loved…  and in having that fear I think I helped manifest that reality.  We both tried to express in actions, but honestly, not nearly enough as we should have.