Page 51 - Advanced Romance

48 Advanced Romance*
That is, the belief that once you begin a sexual relationship with someone you are going to continue that relationship the rest of your life. And to get out of the relationship you have to cause great harm to the other person, as well as greatly loath yourself.
Even suggesting the above is tantamount to proving a person is immoral. But now, given the 50% breakup rate, one might assume that there’s almost a fifty-fifty chance that your new relationship will not last forever. (From now on I’ll throw the divorce rate into the break up rate to yield what has to be a fairly conservative number of 50%.) In fact, you can now almost assume otherwise, that your relationship won’t last forever,
but that it’s tolerable if it doesn’t. This will feel like a dumbing down of relationships to many, but it may
just be facing facts and so maximizing love rather than compromising it.
But few people see it this way. On the contrary, it’s assumed that if you enter a serious sexual relationship with someone, you want it to last for life. Certainly, you hope the happiness you feel that has inspired you to enter into a serious sexual relationship will last forever. And for many it does! But again, at the risk
of obnoxious ad nauseum, to count on that, given the 50% divorce rate, is the height of illogic. It would make Spock’s Star Trek logical head spin.
Yet such is the reality. And the corollary to that reality is that to get out of a relationship you have to