relationship success

I don't think a relationship's success should be measured in how well two people get on together but rather should be about how well they deal with disagreement when they don't. Relationships are built on love, friendship, acceptance and compromise.

Love...is a little more mundane than single people and teenagers and newlyweds think it is. What it is is hard work. It's fantastic in the same kind of mundane way, too, in the way that someone who loves you will listen to a story you've told more than once before, and attentively keeping an ear to what bits you change. (1)

You know you are in love with someone when even just sitting on the couch in front of the T.V. , curled in their arms has you no less happy than if you were lying basking in sunshine on some tropical beach, equally curled in their arms. Because when we share our time and place with our loved ones, nothing else matter. Everything-else suddently melt away into insignificence. That's not to say I would say no to a holiday in the sun (especially after this lousy summer we had) but I still appreciate the loved one in my life.

Friendship is one of those funny things. Everyone has a different view of what exactly constitutes a friend. If I hand you a spoon and a pot of jam there are many shapes, sizes and designs of spoon and many flavours, sweetnesses and textures of jam but at the end of the day you'll still be able to take the jam from the pot and place it on your toast or scone. But if you and another person you know share mutual acquaintances you may be at odds over which ones are friends and indeed over exactly how to classify some-one as a friend. That is why girls in particular add that little cop-out of ‘best-friend’. Few like to be thought of as ‘just’ an acquaintance so instead of having ‘acquaintances’ and ‘friends’ we have ‘friends’ and ‘best-friends’.

For me I shy away from attaching labels to people and I deal with people on a one-by-one basis. I have people with whom I enjoy hanging out, and there are others I can’t stand but at the end of the day if I was in need of anything, there is only one person I could bet my life on. And that person is mu kallis Eva. And really, that’s the way it should be. Everyone has their own life to live. We don’t own our friends even though popular culture would have us think it otherwise.

Love and friendship are all very well in a relationship and indeed, one can't survive without them, but equally as important is acceptance and compromise. Not getting married to someone before you have lived with them for a while is not bad advice at all. That girl may look amazing in her LBD (2) on the date but how does she keep her bedroom? And 'Mr. Right' might be swave and sophisticated on that one night of the week when he sweeps you off your to atke you to that fancy French resto but can he cook for the other nights in the week?

Eva and I have been living together since July 2007 and I must say that whilst it all hasn't been an 'eye-opener' we have learned alot about each other. On the less-than-serious side, for me I had to find out about Eva's vice in her love of watching Japanese anime online her difficulty in getting her socks from her feet to the wash-basket (without spending a week on the floor) and she had to get used to my love of quiet slow mornings and my obsession with order in my books - but little else. There are of course loads of small little quirks in both of us that take a while to get used to but we are working on accepting them and have come to see them as core to who we are. It is after all the quirks that set-us apart and make us unique and which are remembered after we part from this world.

And last but not least - compromise. We both have very different taste in music and mostly different taste in food. She thinks it's normal for cheese to be the colour blue and I have yet to convince her of the tastiness of salami. I think the hardest part of this notion of compromise has been in the choosing of a film that both of us would like to watch. We are still working on that one and maybe we will never come to see eye-to-eye but perhaps that's a good thing. It would be tragic of we were mirror-copies of each other.

(1) - She's Not the Man I Married by Helen Boyd / (2) - Little Black Dress