On Relationships.

I've received some feedback recently about my Nature of Attraction post, and was asked about the nature of love and relationships. I will not talk about the nature of love, outside of it as a necessity in a healthy relationship. Love is too fucking complicated to really describe in my own verbal capacity as of yet. Maybe after this weekend.

Relationships, however, are well within my ability.

A healthy relationship is more than just liking someone enough to bring them around in public and have sex with them. It's more than having someone to be comfortable around, or to write sappy songs about and regret two years later. A healthy relationship is built on trust, honesty, love, compromise, and commonality.

Trust and honesty are obviously linked, but not the same. Trust is something that must be earned in most situations in life. Without trust, a relationship can never actually happen. In this case, trust is conferred usually after a trigger event in the early stages of the "courtship phase," which is the time of exceptional stupidity between two people interested in one another.

Honesty is the way you keep trust. This doesn't always mean not lying when you go out drinking with your friends, or admitting when you forgot an important date (Note: admission does not earn forgiveness.) It also means showing genuine character without masking the things about yourself that you don't like. If you're hoping to share your life with this person, they're going to have to know how you are. Otherwise, you are not only doomed to fail in the relationship, but not even retain the (now) former lover as a friend. If you liked them enough to consider being with them in the first place, you probably still want to be friends. So don't be a dick.

Love's complicated. It alone is also not enough to save a relationship. Sometimes love alone can lead people to do many crazy and stupid things, but it should not be the only reason you're with someone. As love is also too big to put into words, it is also too big to always be there at the start of a relationship. It should grow into it. If anyone says straight away that they love you, they're probably lying to nail you or bat-shit crazy with abandonment issues. The most important thing to take away is that love is a definite must, but not too early on.

A lot of people say "love is give and take." Most of these people also live in Clicheville, and couldn't form an original thought if you threatened to torch their houses. Unfortunately, this one is situationally correct. There must be a degree of compromise between a couple, but not about the grand things that people imagine. Sometimes it's as limited as giving people time to themselves to gather their thoughts and de-stress. People that make jokes about developing a timeshare for who gets to drive the minivan are usually too pussy-whipped to really understand that they've lost all they really had for themselves. The same is said about people that refuse to leave the house whenever a show is on, even when their lover got tickets to a concert for that night. Neither example is really compromise or absence of it in a meaningful way, both are examples of a couple that will probably fight often.

Commonality is one of the most important, underrated traits a relationship must have. If you have nothing in common with your lover, then you probably saw a way to work your libido and love came by way of repetition. This can also change as a relationship goes on. When you started dating you both liked football, birdwatching, and painting. As time went on, your lover stopped liking painting, you stopped liking birdwatching, and neither of you liked football after watching your favorite team lose at the Superbowl... four years in a row. You both feel comfortable with the relationship, knowing that it is still better than you feel you could ever land otherwise. So you never split up, even though you fight all the time. This issue can be fixed relatively easily, even though it's one of the biggest reasons why couples fail. Find something you're both interested in again, and try to find out why you both grew away from the things you liked in the first place. Most couples can be saved in this way, even if they don't realize it. In essence it means relearning your lover's personality, but it's a small setback compared to ending the relationship and going on a drinking binge until you're broke and covered in your own vomit.

So the final recap:

DO Trust.
DO NOT Lie.
DO Love.
DO Compromise.
DO NOT Let comfort blind you.

If you do these things, your relationship should be much more healthy than others would be. It works best when applied to long term relationships, but it seems to be a good general set of rules on its own.