Lifestyle

There Comes A Time In Every Relationship When You Have To Decide If You're All In Or Out

by Tiffani Robinson

July 9, 2014

Stocksy

Heartbreak: It's a crazy paradox between pain and existence. It’s the ability to live day-by-day when an encounter you once thought would last for infinity comes to a definite end.

This isn't high school love, a time when your casualties were simply notions along your young journey of what it was you didn't like. Nor is this college, a time of discovery for a potential glimpse into whom you might become once you've "settled."

Rather, it’s a moment in time you have cultivated from your past experiences. I don't believe one falls in love.

I believe you are trapped in it. Completely consumed by everything he does, down to his habits and mannerisms, until that one day you notice how uncontrollably he bites his bottom lip when around you and then, you realize your infinity.

But, something happens during your stay in euphoria. Along the course of exploration of to whom you've chosen to stay committed, you realize an imbalance.

Efforts to maintain a relationship seem to not have the same high regard in the eyes of the other person involved.

Beautiful encounters are now riddled with bickering and slight jabs to push each other's emotional buttons because it hurts just a tad bit more when it comes from someone with whom you're madly in love.

The little things in the beginning that meant so much now go unnoticed, and you deeply wish for psychic powers, just so you can know what’s on the other person’s mind.

"You've changed."

This is a transition that occurs in every relationship. It is during this time that you prepare for the end or build for the future. You have to understand that the catalyst of change is subtle and deliberate and rarely ever sudden.

You have to make a choice, Morpheus style: You either move forward or backward, all in or out.

There is no in-between. There is no mediocrity in love.

If you must stay, know that you have made a decision to attack your problems, not to tolerate them. During the course of relationships, people either grow closer together or further apart. When growing — emotionally and mentally — the laws of friction naturally occur, but it's not a bad thing.

You will rub your partner the wrong way during growing pains, but this is the time to learn his or her problem-solving skills during interpersonal conflict.

Love can be an unsteady occupation, but with fortitude, patience, communication and a yearning desire to adapt, you could have a vocation that produces unimaginable benefits.

In social media, the unfriend or unfollow button has been so detrimental for our emotional capacities to maintain relationships. It is just not as simple as unfriend or unfollow. When you make the decision to permanently end a relationship, time is imperative and pain is necessary.

You need time to let those feelings subside, to a point that your impulses control your actions.

Time gives you the opportunity to contemplate every encounter, both beautiful and flawed, with that person so you have a well-rounded resolution to move forward. We have tendencies to sedate pain, which is the unhealthiest thing you can do when you want to end a relationship. Instead, grieve!

Grieve so you know how it feels; grieve so you will remember the pain and then grieve some more. But, once you have taken this moment, move forward and don't look back. Your next encounter might be with The One.

It would be a shame to be dressed improperly for the new season in your life. Let it go.