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The best you can hope from your love life, until you find the one that sticks, is to learn something from the flaming wreckage of every relationship. You sift through the the mangled pieces, find the black box and see if you can figure how how and when it all went wrong.
The problem for most people is that they're too upset at the end of a relationship to see things clearly. In my case, the biggest obstacle seems to be that I've never initiated ending a relationship, and I've never gotten a straight answer about why a relationship ended. I'm pretty sure no one ever actually tells anyone they ever cared about what it is about them that made them intolerable. It's tempting to tell myself that each of these young women just had some individual decision-making deficiency and that none of it was my fault, but I'm a dude acutely aware of his faults, even if they're not necessarily things I find too odious myself.
The truth of the matter is that it's never any one thing that kills a relationship. It's everything, in context, that makes a relationship fail. And all you can do to keep from making the same mistake over again is to avoid recreating those circumstances. The further you get from each relationship, the easier it is to boil each one down into a single pithy lesson for yourself to keep in the back of your mind. Let's go chronological instead of in order of importance. That would only depress everyone.
Summer of 2002: There's no such thing as having enough mental health for both sides of a relationship.
Spring of 2003: You can only keep the soft-edged first-date version of yourself going for so long before a girl starts to either resent your passivity or notice that you're lying.
Fall of 2003: Starting a relationship as a spiteful joke might be ill-advised.
Spring of 2004: Every relationship functions in a vacuum. A girl you don't want your friends to meet is bad news.
Summer of 2004: Stay away from ex-girlfriends when they're single.
Fall of 2004: Stay away from ex-girlfriends when they're drunk.
Summer of 2005: At some point, being the only reliable person in someone else's life becomes a burden for you and a source of resentment for them.
Winter 2005: Nervous awkwardness only lasts so long into the relationship. After a point, she's either mentally ill, or looking for the door.
Fall of 2007: Try to stay on task. A girl's not going to wait around forever.
Spring of 2008: Be careful of a girl who refuses to label things. Sometimes it's just jitters, but sometimes she just doesn't want to label you.
Fall of 2009: If you're a guy who wears a suit and tie to go buy cigarettes maybe "something casual" isn't right for you.
I haven't really managed to cobble those lessons together into a unified theory as yet, but I can at least smell those problems before they hit me again. I've got some extra time on my hands and money in my pocket. I'm ready to meet new problems. With any luck, they'll be small ones that will seem cute in retrospect.
I'm Dan. I'm probably free this Friday.
- Location: Suburban Minneapolis
- it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
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