Love is a game of missed connections. But perhaps there's a limit to how many rounds we can play.
Love has a funny way of getting its timing wrong.
The person you fall for doesn't seem particularly interested in you, while the person who's crazy about you somehow fails to stir your heart. And even when two people genuinely like each other, love can still go spectacularly wrong. Sometimes, it's simply a matter of bad timing or missed opportunities.
That's the truly frustrating part. And, of course, we only seem to understand what went wrong once it's all over.
Now, if we're going to be a little brutally realistic about love, here's an uncomfortable truth: the person you're madly in love with is often in a rather convenient position to take advantage of you.
When you're head over heels, you're perfectly willing to grant favours, fulfil requests, and make sacrifices, treating them as the natural price of admission to someone's heart. Love, after all, has a remarkable talent for clouding our judgment.
There's a reason for that. The moment we start thinking too rationally, we begin to lose touch with the very sensations that make love possible.
Imagine touching someone's skin while consciously treating the experience as a scientific observation or an experiment. How much of the actual sensation would you feel?
Not much, I suspect.
Once all the blood rushes to your brain, there's precious little left for romance.
And that brings us to the problem.
When the passionate days of falling in love give way to the ordinary demands of rational, everyday life, romance inevitably begins to lose its shine.
You work hard all week, desperately catch up on sleep over the weekend, and perhaps drag yourself to the cinema with bloodshot eyes if you're feeling particularly ambitious.
At that point, who has the energy for romance?
You might as well throw your love life to the dogs. Or the cats.
Perhaps that's why some people compensate by adopting a pet. They claim they're looking for companionship, but let's face it: they've quite literally given their love life to the dogs.
And the cats, too, for good measure.
Falling in Love Takes Energy. Lots of It.
Consider how people look for relationships these days.
Instead of spending time getting to know someone, enjoying the delicious uncertainty of mutual attraction, or gathering the courage to make a move—even at the risk of spectacular rejection—we increasingly turn to blind dates, matchmaking services, and professional marriage agencies.
It would be easy to assume that we've simply become too awkward, too timid, or too inexperienced to approach someone we genuinely like.
But I suspect the explanation is far simpler.
We just don't have the energy.
Building a relationship takes an extraordinary amount of emotional and mental effort. And once you've experienced a few serious romances, you tend to head in one of two directions.
Some people throw themselves into yet another relationship.
They still have emotional fuel left in the tank, and they're determined to keep the engine running until the very last drop has been burned.
Of course, someone will inevitably insist that falling in love actually gives them energy.
Perhaps it does, for a while.
But romance is ultimately a game that consumes a finite supply of physical stamina and emotional resilience. Those who believe otherwise probably haven't played long enough to exhaust their reserves—or they're simply looking back through the wonderfully flattering lens of nostalgia.
Others, meanwhile, decide they've had quite enough.
They give up on romance altogether.
Perhaps they've already burned through their emotional reserves. Perhaps they've had enough experiences to feel satisfied.
Although, come to think of it, satisfied isn't quite the right word.
It's more that they simply can't bear the thought of going through all that emotional expenditure again.
How Many Relationships Does It Take to Get Married?
Ask married people how many romantic partners they had before tying the knot, and an interesting pattern begins to emerge.
In the United States, the answer often seems to hover around five.
South Korean surveys have suggested something broadly similar. In one survey conducted about fifteen years ago, only 4 percent of respondents reported having dated just one person.
In other words, most people appear to keep dating until they eventually get married.
Naturally, there are exceptions.
Some people spend their entire lives moving from one romantic relationship to another. Others marry, divorce, and remarry so many times that marriage itself starts to resemble a recurring hobby.
But do we really look at these people and think, Wow, what an enviable life!
Not usually.
More often, we wonder whether they simply haven't found the right person—or whether something else is going on.
Take Tom Cruise, for example.
Whenever he visits South Korea, crowds gather, fans scream, and people practically swoon when he flashes one of those adorable finger hearts.
Yet even those enthusiastic admirers are likely to regard his complicated romantic and marital history with a certain sympathy.
Personally, I suspect his turbulent love life has something to do with the same relentless energy that drives him to make film after film and push everyone around him to extraordinary lengths.
And yes, there's a part of me that envies that energy.
But I wouldn't go so far as to describe his marital history as merely the happy consequence of having an exceptionally passionate heart.
Eventually, Even Love Gets Tired
Some of us experience the confusion and heartbreak of love only once.
Others go through it three or four times.
Still others keep trying five times or more.
And then, somewhere along the way, with slightly exhausted eyes and considerably diminished expectations, we meet someone—and suddenly decide to get married.
It isn't necessarily a grand romantic revelation.
Sometimes, it's simply that we've grown tired of starting over.
Of course, no one deliberately sets out to repeat the same painful experiences.
We might enter a relationship sincerely hoping to stay together for years and years, perhaps for the rest of our lives.
Yet things happen.
Our rational minds begin noticing flaws that our lovestruck hearts once happily ignored.
Or the other person's parents strongly oppose the relationship. Yes, believe it or not, this still happens.
And then there's that particularly dangerous little sentence:
"If that's how you're going to be, maybe we should just break up!"
Sometimes it's said in anger. Sometimes it's a test, a way of finding out just how desperately the other person wants to stay.
But repeat it often enough, and something curious happens.
The other person begins to think:
Ah. So I suppose I should start preparing for the breakup.
Eventually, what began as an emotional bluff becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And two people who once loved each other end up drifting into an awkward, half-hearted separation.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone who married did so simply because they were hopelessly, irresistibly in love?
Of course it would.
But the statistics suggest a rather more complicated story.
According to one survey, roughly 37 percent of respondents had experienced only one or two romantic relationships before marriage. Other figures put the average number of premarital relationships at around 3.6 to 3.9.
Those numbers, I think, tell us something interesting.
Romance Is Not a High-Frequency Trading Strategy
We often assume that as society becomes more open-minded, the number of romantic relationships people experience will inevitably keep increasing.
But there's a practical limit to that.
Relationships take time.
You have to meet someone, get to know them, develop feelings, start dating, and spend enough time together for the experience to count as an actual relationship.
Now suppose you intend to marry before turning forty.
How many serious relationships can you realistically fit into that period?
Four, perhaps.
Maybe five if you're particularly efficient.
But by then, we're getting dangerously close to treating romance like day trading.
And here's the thing about day trading:
Making more trades doesn't necessarily make you richer.
Sometimes, all it does is increase your chances of making yourself ill.
The same goes for love.
Jumping rapidly from one relationship to another is no guarantee of happiness, wisdom, or a successful marriage.
Quite the opposite, perhaps.
There's only so much romantic turbulence a human being can endure before the emotional machinery starts making suspicious noises.
Three Relationships. Then Comes Marriage?
Life is short.
Only 18.5 percent of people have had five or more relationships before marriage. That means the remaining 81.5 percent managed to get married after four relationships or fewer.
Does that mean you have an 80 percent chance of marrying the fourth person you date?
Well, not exactly. At least, not according to any respectable statistician.
But who said love was about respectable statistics?
So here's my advice: give love three good tries. If none of them works out, don't despair. By the fourth, you've already done most of the hard work.
And if you do end up marrying that fourth person, congratulations!
You've just proved my theory.
If you don't? Well, obviously, there's something wrong with the statistics.
No comments:
Post a Comment