The butterflies in your stomach…
The messages all day long…
The back-and-forth over "who hangs up first"…
Thoughts turned towards her/him alone.
In short, the madness of new love …
We all know that feeling, or else we have known it in the past. It is a kind of endless ecstasy in which we live the first weeks or the first months of every relationship. That is the stage we would want to last forever. Alas, like all things, it has an end.
The passion of the early days dwindles.
The pleasure of being reunited withers.
The feasting grows shorter.
You find out, without asking, who hangs up first.
In fact, that is where the love relationship begins. This is where you realize the difference between loving and deciding to love.
The original excitement mutates into an original disexcitement. At that moment, it takes constant, conscious work to go on finding in your partner a new conquest. In other words, a person who deserves your time, your attention, your money, your patience, your tolerance; in short, a person who deserves you.
What comes next is normal and you must not hold it against yourself: with time, there are things you would forgive a new conquest that you would not even think of forgiving a current partner. So it is a matter of finding in your current partner the attributes of a new passion, so as not to reproach them for certain things. Indeed, levelling reproaches over matters you could have kept quiet about is the chief vehicle that hands you a choice seat on the rails to a breakup.
Newness consumes past mistakes, past wrongs and past disappointments.
Would you reproach a new conquest for having hugged a friend?
For having stayed a long while on the phone with a man?
For having let his gaze rest on a woman walking by?
For having missed your birthday? (this example is extreme, but it is worth mentioning.)
Constantly seeing your partner as a "brand new person", holds several advantages. That person then appears as a blank copy, and this gives you the chance to rewrite your story, to improve the chapters and correct the mistakes that have been made. It is, moreover, the one and only way to last as a couple. Yes, the only one!
This attitude is very effective and useful in situations where one of the partners has committed serious wrongs against the other. Seeing a new conquest in your partner makes it possible to close your eyes to certain wrongs the other has done. We pass over them in silence and give ourselves the chance to go on looking in the same direction.
Do not forget to tell yourself each day that your partner is a new conquest, an antique that you coat every morning with a fresh layer of 24-carat gold. Wow!! What a new and precious piece!!!
M. Z.
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