Have you ever been alone in a crowded room when I'm here with you?

Have you ever been alone in a crowded room; well I'm here with you...

Re: my rant at the end of February about how I managed to survive Fort McMurray last year.

I suppose I didn't really have a choice, in the end. The more pertinent question was why I consented to return for another year. A month later, I've figured it out.

It is around this time of year that Fort McMurray begins to look nice. For one, the days are getting longer and the weather is warmer. This whole S.A.D. thing seems to have a bigger effect on me than I was consciously aware of because now that there's a whole lot more sun throughout the day, I'm simply not as annoyed at everything. Furthermore, third term seems to signal the beginning of the end of the school year and again, psychologically, the knowledge that you're on the home stretch helps alleviate the feeling of "being trapped".

That's not even to say that you have to make a decision now. I don't think I really have to decide whether or not to return until 1.5 months from now. By then, we'll REALLY be on the home stretch of the school year and we'll have 20 hour days and the weather will be gorgeous. By then, I'll have partially forgotten how horrible the winters are, which won't help with my whole "make sure you don't return" resolve that I made a few months ago.

Good thing I've already told my employers I'm leaving.

Am I the only one who's terrified of leaning back on EZ recliners for fear that they'll just tip right over and break?

When I was younger (university and, to an extent, high school), I had a certain idea of what it meant when you dated someone for x amount of time. I knew that a year was widely considered to be a major milestone, i.e. if you can make it a year, then you had a shot at being together for the long haul. Three years was considered a long relationship and anything past 5 meant that people assumed you weren't going to break up. Now, I'm not saying that these times weren't arbitrary, but then again, much of what we considered "dating conventions" were arbitrary in some sense. Half your age plus 7, who pays for dates, who asks who, who does what, etc. As I started to transition into adulthood, I noticed that these conventions seemed to change in some rather curious ways, marked by two moments:

1. The day Dave proposed a theory that you have to be in a relationship with someone for at least 1.5 the length of your previous relationship before you're allowed to consider things like marriage.

2. Alan and Linda breaking up after what I think amounts to 8 years together.

Now, to take the first point. Dave speaks tongue in cheek about a lot of things but he seemed to be serious about that particular rule. At first glance, his explanation made sense - given that your previous relationship was "healthy," you can't be sure that your current relationship is the right one for you until you've been in it for longer than the previous one because throughout the duration of your previous relationship (up until the end, I guess), you must have believed that it was the right one for you too. Now, there are obvious holes to this theory; for one, it presupposes that all relationships move at the same pace. That being said, I think most people will accept that there is some validity to the idea that your current relationship should outlast the "milestones" or "checkpoints" you hit in your previous one.

Alan and Linda breaking up brought this theory back to the forefront of my mind. Going by Dave's theory, both Alan and Linda would have to date their next significant others for 12 years before they're "allowed" to say that they're ready to spend the rest of their lives with them. Obviously, this is ludicrous but it got me thinking about what it is that makes this idea crazy. I got to thinking about how someone once told me that when you've established a career for yourself/when people meet each other in the workforce, you don't necessarily date for 5 or 6 years before you got married; rather, 3 years is an acceptable courting period because, presumably, your lives are more stable and you're unlikely to experience some sort of groundbreaking change in your life that would cause you to break up. Compare this to a couple who started dating in high school and where they'd be, three years into that relationship: probably in situation that is nowhere near as stable as a career.

On the surface, this makes sense too. You don't marry your high school sweetheart after three of dating because so much of your life changes between high school and your career. The idea is that if the two of you manage to stick it out through high school, university, and post-grad, then you've successfully overcome some pretty major obstacles that would cause most couples to break up. In fact, the whole thing is pretty much like a big test - the natural strains of having to navigate and support a relationship through graduating from high school, going away to college, having college freedom (time and opportunities to date other people), figuring out what you want to do with your life, and getting a job, will test your willingness to love and commit to one person through the entire ordeal. If the two of you pull through intact, then what more do you need to convince yourselves that you're right for one another?

Well, in Alan and Linda's case, it turns out that they had never actually lived apart from each other. They dated for 8 years and that spanned high school, university, and post-grad... but they were in the same geographic location for each of those epochs (at least, for the first part of post-grad, they were). I have no idea of the extent to which this played a role in their breakup, but I don't think it's insane to suggest that if they didn't end up living in different cities, they might still be together. This gave me furiously to think.

Once again, I'm not making any claims about Alan and Linda's relationship. I'm merely using them as an example of what may be an interesting facet in regards to relationships. If the idea is that people who meet each other after they've started their careers don't have to date as long because their lives are less likely to change, doesn't that mean that we're judging young relationships on a very harsh scale? By no fault of their own, young people are almost obligated to go through changes due to natural, societal progression. So couples who make it through said progression withstand the test of time whereas everyone else waits until they don't HAVE to go through that test?

That, to me, is very interesting. If I take an old couple, who've been married for 50 years and have been happy and fulfilled, you could say that they found "true" or "real" love. But I could just as easily say, "Well, maybe they've only made it this far because they've never been put to the test of having to live in different geographic areas or deal with major, career/life-altering changes." The question is, do you hold that against people? Does the fact that they've never been obligated to "test" their love mean anything? Obviously, being in a relationship offers plenty of tests as it is, but as I mentioned before, I don't think anything really compares to geographical distance.

My gut reaction is to say, no. If I see couples who've been married for a long time, who haven't been forced to endure extended periods of physical separation, I don't hold that against them. In the same way, the argument that it's reasonable to get married after dating for 3 years in the workforce because neither of your lives are going to change very much, isn't, in itself, invalid. It may cheapen the idea of love just a little but then again, if everyone had to prove their love by dating for 6 years and enduring an emotional and physical roller coaster throughout the entire process, people might never get married at all. In fact, it's one argument that suggests that love does not, despite what fairy tales say, conquer all; that maybe true love doesn't really exist and that it all boils down to chemicals in our brains.

If this is true, then why does it seem like such a reasonable argument for me to say that I wouldn't be interested in dating Rachel, assuming she were interested, after I move back to Toronto? I've told people that the fact that she couldn't (or wouldn't) make it work long distance kind of makes me not want to date her because I now know that she doesn't like me enough to make it work long-distance, and even though a relationship in Toronto would no longer be long-distance, the knowledge that a long-distance attempt would result in failure seems off-putting. However, in light of this entire blog post, that seems unfair in that MOST couples in the infancy stage of courting would probably not last through a long-distance attempt right from the get go. Most couples are just fortunate enough to never have to undergo that test. In the end, it really just seems to boil down to "ignorance it bliss."

Actually, in the end, it boils down to this: love may not be enough. Timing is still everything. Somehow, the odds now seem even more astronomical than they were before. I don't understand how people are still getting married.