Page 37 - Advanced Romance

34 Advanced Romance*
need to get good at them. And you may need to have
a more diverse support network, and one that includes the opposite sex. This will be insurance for you that you won’t be totally deprived of attractive company if you
do choose to alter your current relationship. And, finally, you need to understand that it’s possible to remain friends with your potential ex. And maybe even see them romantically again in the future.
Do not, and I apologize for the triteness of this, do not put all your relationship eggs in one basket. How many people come back to a former “unsuccessful” love and find that they now can live happily ever after with them? There are no stats for this, as there are no stats for many of the subtleties of relationships. We need a national Love Department to measure and study these things!
But first, to avoid unnecessary breakup pressures you need to develop strategies of what relationship expert Beatty Cohen calls “conflict resolution” in her book For Better, For Worse, Forever: Discover the Path
to Lasting Love.21 As the lust, romance chemicals and other aphrodisiacs become compromised by differences, you need to have the courage and skill to be able to negotiate these differences peacefully. But the fear of the relationship ending prevents many from doing this.
Why is discussing a relationship so difficult? This is where courage comes in. Whenever you are in the romance stage, you need to face that it could end,