When it comes to love and relationships many of us go through roller coasters or feast and famine cycles. We see couples who think spending every waking moment together is love and togetherness. Once we are in love we have to shop together, read together, and watch TV / movies together.
Don’t get me wrong, spending quality time together is very important in any relationship. The real question here is what is quality time? Is it pure quantity of it? or how much quantity matter. These things differ what person to person. But the all said and done, too much of time together is as much a risk to making a relationship meaningless and mundane as too little time can make a relationship fade away.
Instead of giving tips on what to do and not to do. I think the important thing is to understand the definition of love and how people express love. Many people have a subconscious notion that “if he/she jumps through hoops for me” that is love. Well yes, helping your partner is an important part of a relationship, but it should not be seen as a test and surely you should not be measuring how high s/he is willingly jumps at your whim.
Another area is shared interests. It is not necessary that partners share same exact shared interest and if they don’t its not necessary that one partner is dragged along always to the activity of other partners interest. Again if he does not like shopping no point dragging him away from his cricket match for shopping. I am sure there would enough common interests for both to share even if it is nice dining. Leave the rest activities alone.
Besides the activities we share, there are also the mood cycles. When she is chirpy and want to engage in light hearted banter, he could be in a contemplative mood. Once again no point forcing one or the other to change their mood. Its just better that the partners engage with other friends based on that mood and keep them charged for our quality time with each other when the mood is right.
And then there is the classic, after a long spell of love drought, when we find someone we want more and more of them to the point where we start suffocating them with lack of space. We drop calling our friends, we cut into work time, cut time with family all to have more love in our life. All this ends up overwhelming the other partner sooner or later as it becomes impractical to maintain such level of togetherness.
Bottomline is, don’t define love as all these things one or other does “for the sake” of other. Their is no glory in being dragged in the name of love to things we don’t like. Remember, the ideal of love most people really want is closer to the old couple walking silently in the park and holding hands and not a bunch of teenagers clinging to each other as if they are glued together forever.
Very well captured points!
Lovely Blog Floyd!! Congrats!
I really loved the last line of this post!!!! Its funny too 🙂