Does Happiness Within A Relationship Actually Exist?

Love: can't live with it; can't live without it. So what the hell are we to do? There are many different ways to live life — many different variations on the reality that you can create for yourself. One thing that every single person in the world always includes in their world, whether it be directed at oneself, another person, a lifestyle or career, is love.

Human beings cannot live without love — it simply is not possible. For those of us who don't plan on joining a convent, the love that we dream of experiencing is the love between a man and a woman — or man and a man or woman and a woman, depending which team you are batting for.

Yet for some reason, when we find ourselves in the situation that we convinced ourselves that we wanted to be in, we usually can't manage to stay there. From urges to run for our lives to lusting, or simply feeling as if what we once had is slowly shriveling up and dying — being in love and staying in love can prove to be difficult if not impossible.

Why? Why do we choose to punish ourselves time and time again? Because that is exactly what we are doing: punishing ourselves. It's not that love decides to get up and vacate from our relationships — we decide to push it out, to beat it with a hammer until it is crushed and broken. And then we blame the person we are dating for it.

Call me a hopeless romantic, but I believe that true love is possible and for that reason I believe that having a happy relationship is also possible. The biggest problem that I have come across in my personal relationships and the failures they resulted in comes from the misconception that we have of love. We all think that we know what love ought to feel like.

Those of us who were lucky enough to experience love in one of its many forms, fall for the misconception that love does and must always take that first form that we were exposed to. The truth is that love is not a stable thing — it changes, morphs, develops and switches faces over time.

Believing that you could possibly know what love is, is naïve. You can — and will — spend your entire life learning about love and all its different forms without ever being able to grasp it in its entirety.

When we first fall in love, love presents itself in its most intense form. At this point, the love is new — fresh. The intensity that we are experiencing is not the love itself, it is the change from nothing to love that we are experiencing with such force.

Just as in physics, we are unable to feel velocity itself, but only the change in velocity, we are unable to feel love once we have been living it for an extended period of time. Love is so intense at its onset because we are going from the feelings of our everyday lives to feeling love. After a while, however, though the love may remain the same, we believe it to be waning because it is no longer new — no longer as exciting.

And this is when our minds start to wander and we quickly become our own worst enemies. We begin to doubt whether the love, that at the time we were certain beyond a doubt in our minds to have been experiencing, was actually there to begin with or whether it was just an illusion that our mind had created.

Let me be the first to tell you that it is not possible to imagine and manifest a pseudo-love; what you may have felt was only a small taste of what love can be, and it may have dispersed as quickly as it made itself noticed, but you did feel love — even if only in its weakest form.

Love is what unites all living things in the world. You can feel love for an animal just as you can for a friend. Romantic love — the love we feel when we are in a relationship — is basically love on Viagra; it's a combination of loving the person and wanting to sex them up.

There is a reason why people, when they believe they are falling out of love, no longer yearn to have sex with their partner: without wanting to f*ck your partner, you no longer are experiencing romantic love and are left with the same love that you feel towards other good friends.

If this is true, then all you need to reignite the flame of love that you so badly want to burn through your veins is to bring back that initial sexual attraction that had you two shagging like bunnies for hours at a time. Whether or not that is possible depends on each individual case and only you alone know if a sexual attraction is beyond repair.

Don't fall for the "grass is green on the other side" bit — it always seems that way. And then you hop over the fence and you realize that the field is full of weeds — and not the kind you can roll-up and light-up either. Lust is a natural part of being a sexual human being; we always want to put another notch in our belts.

The funny thing about belts is that you can only put so many holes in them before they become useless, gnarled pieces of leather incapable of holding your pants up. Being happy in a relationship, continuing to stay in love with the person requires you to accept all the different forms of love and understanding that loving is a learning experience.

If you have ever felt love for someone, then chances are that you can feel some variation of it again; however, romantic love may be out of the question — but again that depends on each individual case. If you are considering ending a relationship because you feel like the love you once shared is gone, be sure to consider your situation closely.

Ending a relationship preemptively may leave you realizing that you made a big mistake down the line. Unfortunately, once you make that mistake, what you had will never, ever return. Ever.

Paul Hudson | Elite. 

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