The Question

I have been in a romantic relationship for over a year now. As with all such things, the initial rush is replaced by the more quotidian reality of living, sleeping and sharing life with another person who, like all of us, is damaged and broken in significant ways, even as my flaws and deficiencies become obvious.

My girlfriend is about as good as they get: she is kind, loving, patient, hard-working. She loves my kids and me to a fault. She is as domestic and family-oriented as I am, and a great, really great mother. We have a lot of fun together. She is fully committed to the process of working through issues in our relationship. For reasons I fail to fully comprehend, she thinks I am the hottest guy to grace the planet with footsteps. She is also sometimes insecure, possessive, jealous, co-dependent, judgmental and a nicotine addict, all of which she is working on, striving mightily to overcome. She is very much in love with me and wants nothing more than to spend every moment with me, which can be both good and bad.

I have questions to answer:
- Am I ready to commit the time and effort required to manage, negotiate, compromise, forge into existence a mutually fulfilling relationship? (It is never free)
- Am I willing to expose myself to the risk of a fully committed relationship? If I disappoint my partner, fail to deliver what she expects of me, will she settle for using me as a means to an end, as my ex-wife did? What if she deeply disappoints me?
- Am I willing to once again subsume my individuality to the group-mind of 'married' life? effectively giving up any independent life, friends, interests? (or how much of those am I willing to trade in exchange for the good stuff of a relationship).

As important as those questions are, the question I find myself pondering most is what determines the amount of effort required to make a relationship work and the ultimate quality of the end result.

Are relationships always gruelingly hard? Is the effort required to make them work, the risk of being used, the extinction of one's independence determined by the individuals involved or the practical realities of their relationship?

Let's say, just for example, that a man and woman have an amazingly open, honest, profoundly (emotionally) intimate friendship, is it because:

A- These two people are well "matched", with "compatible" temperaments, interests, communication styles, values, humor, and backgrounds. They somehow establish and maintain an open, honest, healthy mode of interaction, through unwavering honesty, strong sense of self, devotion to Rule #1 ("Be happy") and to each other.

Or is it because:

B- They aren't *actually* dating. They aren't sleeping together, raising kids together, wrestling over money and house chores, dealing with raised toilet seats and moldy coffee cups, trying to figure out the balance between togetherness and independence, thereby simply avoiding the complications of a romantic relationship (jealousy, power struggle and simple stress). In other words, is friendship simply so very much easier than a full-on romantic/living relationship? If so, one must chose: a wonderfully open, intimate relationship OR a romantic one.

Option A is the romantic, optimistic (or is it delusional?) view: you only have to find a suitable match and establish/maintain a healthy, open, free relationship. Option B is the pessimistic, jaded (or is it realistic?) view: we are all interchangeable, the things that determine the nature of a relationship are its objective specifications (kids, money, sex).

As I ponder my life and what to do in the next few months, I think it really comes down to this question: "What to I believe?". I think we all want to believe in option 'A', I certainly do. Perhaps the raw leap of faith of believing in 'A', is what makes us human, and life worth living.

Or does the eternal optimism of 'A', however irresistibly attractive, merely expose us as us silly and irrational, never learning from experience, condemned to repeat the same mistake over and over in futile pursuit of what can never be, hurting ourselves and everyone else because we aren't willing to 'settle' for the world we *actually* live in?

When I figure it out, I'll have a better idea of what I should do.