Dating : On Love, Relationships, and Leaping

Or, why HEAs are bullsh*t

First, let me apologize to you in advance, because I’m about to state an obvious thing:

This year has sucked.

Extremely.

Rest assured, this post is not going to numerate all of the ways this year has sucked because a) I know you already know; and b) you probably know more than I do, since I’ve largely coped with this year through a consistent and dedicated strategy of willful ignorance.

That being said, I haven’t entirely been living under a rock. I still see and talk to people — while following all of the public health rules, of course! — so I have a sense of know what’s going on in their lives.

I hear about how they’re doing: how they’re struggling, thriving, surviving, or striving. (Or, sometimes, sadly, none of the above.)

And, as one of my friends’ “go-to” people for advice, I also hear about how well things are going — or not — in their relationships.

Here’s another obvious statement (sorry again!):

This pandemic has been hard on relationships.

I’m not just thinking about the reported increases in IPV (intimate partner violence) during lockdowns and self-isolations / quarantines.

I’m also thinking about just how much harder the pandemic has made it to do the regular, everyday things required for maintaining a loving relationship with your partner.

Once again, you can rest assured that I’m not going to numerate all of the ways the pandemic has made relationships harder becauseI couldn’t possibly know — or even imagine — them all.

What I am going to do instead is segue into a discussion about weddings.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Let’s talk about weddings.

Because I’ve had them on the brain for the past several months.

No, I’m not getting married: that ship sailed seven (and a half!) years ago, my friends.

Nor have I attended, or will be attending, a wedding any time soon.

However, I do know one person who got married this year, and another person who recently got engaged.

When I found out about these weddings — the one that happened just a couple of months ago, and the one that is TBD — I asked the questions that you normally ask: “Where is it?”, “Do you have a venue?”, “Is it going to be a big wedding or a small one?”

The answers — “Back home”, “Not sure”, “It depends on whether we’ll be allowed to fly again because all of our family live overseas, including our grandparents who are too old fly here” — reminded me that in these times, there’s nothing “normal” about these questions.

I find myself trying — and failing — to imagine what it would be like to have a wedding during a global health pandemic.

I look back at my own wedding: at all of the stress and anxiety that what I referred to as the wedding industrial vortex pulled me into, and I can’t even begin to understand what the additional layer of COVID-19 stress might be doing to anyone who got married this year (and maybe even to anyone who is getting married next year).

Whether you agree with the concept / institution of marriage, or whether you can resist getting sucked into the Vortex, you can’t deny that weddings are A Very Big Deal in virtually every culture around the world.

And understandably so, right?

I mean, as far as Public Displays of Affection go, they’re right up there. (j/k)

Plus, there’s the whole “committing yourself legally, socially, and emotionally to one person for the rest of your life” thing.

Plus-plus, there’s the added socialization of weddings and marriage as the ultimate Happily Ever After (HEA).

(For the folks who have binged-watched Bridgerton like I did, I know you know what I mean.)

But, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from being married, it’s this:

Weddings have virtually nothing to do with a couple’s HEA.

Which is fantastic.

Because HEAs are bullsh*t.

HEAs only make sense if the couple gets crystallized in amber (figuratively speaking, of course) the moment they exchange rings.

Still, while we all know intellectually, that HEA is not a real “thing”, I don’t think there’s shame in acknowledging just how deeply we’ve internalized that message.

I mean, there’s a reason that the romantic fiction industry is worth approximately $1 billion (USD) a year. This is an industry that I, myself, unapologetically contribute to by reading — and occasionally watching — romance novels voraciously.

Still, it can be hard to disentangle the fantasy promised by HEAs from the expectations you have of your partner, of your relationship, and even — and perhaps most importantly — of yourself. That being said…

I was rather pragmatic, and kind of unsentimental, about my own wedding.

I can still remember my maid of honour’s disbelief at how dry-eyed and “unfluttered” I was on my wedding day. She may even have inquired as to whether I was secretly a robot. (Don’t worry. I’m not.)

I also remember the eyeroll she gave me when I told her that there was no reason for me to be anything but dry-eyed and unfluttered, because I’d known from the moment I met my husband that he would be the man of my life.

So for me, our wedding day was, in some ways, just another day that ended in “y”. I was simply making public what my husband and I had known privately for almost the entirety of our relationship.

Even so, we have definitely had some challenges during this year. They all essentially boil down to this:

I feel that he takes for granted too much of the unpaid emotional, intellectual, and physical labour I perform as the de facto CEO of our family and household — labour, by the way, that is even more fraught and exhausting because of the pandemic — and he feels…

Well, actually, I don’t know how he feels.

There are a lot of things I love about him, but his resistance to what I’ll call “emotional communication” is not one of them.

Which is why I’ve been reminding myself, and why I want to remind you, why HEAs are bullsh*t:

The “happily” part comes not from staying in one place forever after, but from both of you committing to staying “decrystallized”.

Here’s a quote from a romance novel I read recently that helps explain what I mean:

People got in relationships with people who fit them well enough and then they remade themselves to fit even better — or they broke up. (From “Not The Girl You Marry”, by Andie J. Christopher. Emphasis added.)

In other words, in relationships it’s necessary to accept — and to honour — that you are both going to learn, grow, and change over your time together.

And it’s necessary to commit to doing your best to learn, grow, and change in ways that support and strengthen your relationship.

I’m happy to say that, for the most part, my husband and I do this well. (If you, also, are also partnered, I hope that this is true for you, too.)

But, this relationship stuff is not always easy, or enjoyable.

In fact, there may be times when it will be incredibly, irrevocably hard. Which may result in the ending of a relationship, as it did for a friend of mine when she separated from her husband this summer.

Ultimately, relationships are a leap of faith. You won’t know where — or how — you’re going to land…

But you can always find happiness in the knowledge that you’re leaping — or that you took the leap — together.