Origins

It's crazy how entrenched we are in spontaneous romance.

I mean think about it, when you're in a relationship with someone, people always ask "How did you meet?" And if you tell them "We had physics lab together" they just nod their heads and think "Oh. Not very interesting." But if you say you were in the airport in NYC, you saw someone across the terminal, thought they were absolutely beautiful, and just had to meet them. So you went up to this person and told them exactly that (and you weren't totally creepy..or even if you were), then people get all excited. It's different, it's interesting, it's sudden. It's romantic. If you aren't in a relationship, you think "Oh maybe that'll happen to me some day", and maybe you even start looking around when you're in an airport wondering if anyone has spotted you when you walk off the plane. And if you are in a relationship, maybe you think "Wow, I wish it could have been like that for me" or "That makes me think of the crazy way that I met my partner".

But no one ever asks (and this in excerpted from a story on This American Life) "How did you stay together?" We don't want to know that stuff. It's boring. It was probably a lot of work, and we don't want to view love as work. No matter how rational we are, we still want to believe that sudden romance is all you need for a life-long amazing relationship. But we all know that's not true (and if you don't know it, well...I suggest you start figuring it out). The longevity stories are the interesting ones to me. Despite all kinds of misery and upheaval, I don't want to know what brought two people together, I want to know what kept them together.

Sure, origins have a lot of meaning, a lot of the time. But if you're always thinking back to that, are you ever moving forward?