Only mildly disconcerting. Cattenberg is staying in the spare room over the last couple and the next couple of nights because of the Kittencat's birthday, and we've been chatting away about odds and ends, and somehow we got onto longevity of relationships. I can't remember how it came up, but Cattenberg reminded me that when we'd been going out for about six whole months, and had either just found out or were about to just find out about Kittencat, someone had said to me that if he hadn't suggested making things more serious within a set period that I should end it. Now, I should hasten to add that my head was nowhere near that sort of thing back then, I had student debts aplenty, and had downsized my life to accommodate clearing debts and saving, and I had no plan for thinking about children or serious relationships for at least the next three to four years. So it was irrelevant to me and the situation. At the time, I'm pretty sure that neither Cattenberg or I were thinking about the long haul. That said, our conversation tonight started around this, and I have to say that looking on it, I can kind of see the point the helpful soul was making.
In the beginning of a relationship, it's all shiny and new and you want to spend all your time together, and although I don't think jumping into something before you know someone is wise, after the first 6 months - 2 years you do generally know someone well enough to test drive the living together idea, if you're still madly enamored and can stand them and everything, chances are that you should be wanting to think about a potential future, even if it's not very far ahead. If you aren't, then you have to think quite seriously about not just whether you're wasting someone else's time (after a certain age biological degradation is a serious concern, reproductively and otherwise, and it's unfair to decrease someone's opportunities and chances for getting what they want), but also your own. Although you may be comfortable coasting along with someone that you aren't in love with, they fill a vaguely significant other shaped hole, don't annoy you too much, and also the sex, you risk missing out on something that would make you happy just because what you have is, well, it's okay. It's not amazing. But all your friends are settling down, they've got girlfriends/boyfriends/ferrets/allotments, and you feel a little lonelier than when everyone was out until 11am drinking tequila out of a bottle in a shopping trolley racing hair raisingly fast down a hill, or deciding to have a barbeque by a duckpond in a field at 5am after a three hour limbo competition using a detached strip light as a bar (all a little hazy, but definitely happened, somewhere...). And you've got someone to get naked with, watch TV with, talk to when everyone else is too busy to. And yeah, it's nice. You don't want to end up with them, but, it's nice. And you coast. And you coast. And then you end up a little trapped. And running away is suddenly a much bigger deal, because you're older, and less pretty, and a bit fatter, and more irritable, and even more of your friends are all relationshiped up, and all you remember about meeting people was getting drunk as a skunk and letting the beer haze do the rest. And you look at what you have, the little you have, and you worry that despite how lonely you are, you'll be lonelier on your own, that you'll never manage better, so why not settle, why not make it work? But if you aren't happy so early on, you aren't going to get happier. If you aren't interested in talking to your significant other, you aren't going to find them more interesting if you just give it a little more time. You're just going to wake up one day with the courage to run away, only to find yourself less interesting to other people.
Cattenberg said that he didn't really find it worrying that he was subject to the longest relationship I've ever inflicted on anybody, but that people do tend to judge you on the length of your previous relationships, that somehow the perception is that how you have been previously indicates how you will be in the future. I can understand this, I've lived in house shares, I've heard these kind of discussions - "Well, he was like that with Soandso, and Soandso..." - but, and this possibly puts me in a minority, I've never been attracted to the serial monogamist, and I've never really been one myself. It's rare that I've done the coast with an alright relationship thing, generally I've had little enough patience to get bored and irritated with that which is not right quickly enough to kill it nice and dead. So yes, Cattenberg was my longest relationship, and there were a couple of stints of around a year, give or take, but I've generally been a 2 week to 2 month person all my adult life. Because if it's not fun after 2 weeks, it's not going to get funner.
P.S. I feel I ought to state that despite not being a serial monogamist, I've been in love. Maybe I will be again. Being in love is awesome. Relationships, when you're in love, are awesome. But the serial monogamist is a creature that scares me, the idea that someone is with you because they can't be alone rather than actually wanting to be with you is a terrifying one. I ended something once with someone I really did love because for them it wasn't about being with me, it was about having a girlfriend. And that felt lonely as hell.
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