Dating : Relationship Myth: Dry Spells Break Connections

Fact: Acceptance makes it a hell of a lot easier.

Last night my partner and I went out with separate friends, had different drinks, and came home at separate times. We had been under a dry spell for some time that felt to me like it had lasted forever. At dinner on the other side of town, I sat with a friend that I’ve known for years. Sipping wine, I solicited advice on different ways to flirt and encourage him to f* me when he got home.

She said, “Why don’t you just text him now and ask him to wake you up when he gets there?”

Brilliant.

After he woke me up and shook my world for the first time in almost a month, we talked and laughed in the kitchen at 1:30 in the morning. He warmed up leftover pasta; I sat on the counter sipping water and trying to rehydrate after many glasses of wine. I stared at his defined muscles with his shirt off. He glanced at me sitting in the lingerie I had fallen asleep in before he had come home. He now started to speak more softly,

“You know, sometimes I don’t realize until I go out with my friends how accepting you are of me.”

Many of my partner’s thirty-something friends are in less mature relationships or having fights that we may never experience. You know the relationships I’m talking about, where quarrels break out over text messages or friend requests that seem like relational devastations. These younger relationships can be volatile and dramatic, but they are not what my partner and I share at all.

“I told a story about our interaction one night, and my friends replied with, ‘You threw out that crazy story like some casual mishap man! And she responded with the same casual response. Most girls would have freaked out on me if I came home and said that.’ My friends made me realize how much you accept me even in my failures,” he said, smiling.

My partner makes mistakes.

I make mistakes.

Ultimately, we are human and will spend time making errors with the hopes of learning from them in relationships. The reason I believe that my partner and I can go through hard conversations, dry spells, different schedules, and inevitable f* ups is because we have one agreement. The agreement is, “If anything happens to disrupt our connection, we tell one another with full disclosure; even the most subtle of experiences.”

In reality, our relationship has never experienced a huge blowout fight, and it probably never will. Why? Because we both entered the relationship at peace with one another’s flaws. This is the same reason after two years of being together; I can solicit advice from a friend on how to sext and flirt…we don’t make things so heavy in our connection. I know that he doesn’t entirely do mornings and he knows I don’t like to stray from my early workout routines. We both enjoy and appreciate privacy. We are both aware of critical boundaries. We have a world together and our worlds that we can go to refresh our connection.

As he puts it, “Our box is built, and we decide who comes in and how.”

As a mature couple with plenty of experiences, it can be interesting to observe other young relationships that are nowhere like our own. As an older couple, we also realize the challenges (like dry spells) we will face are sophisticated and sincere because we are way past the surface. In the deepest of waters, we find our inner selves. In the biggest of waves, we surf the stability of our connection with moments of ease and moments of intensity. We don’t fight, we discuss. We don’t bicker or disrespect one another; we share the love.

Being in a relationship means accepting the one you love for who they are even in the hard moments. Love shouldn’t be about freaking out when your partner makes mistakes…it is about laughing it off and asking casually, “What do you feel now?”