There Is Beauty In Not Knowing Where Your Relationship Is Going

There’s a beautiful mystery in the ‘not knowing’. A sense of what could be, a wonder of what might become, and a question of what it might look like. Sometimes, the answer is worth the asking. And sometimes, the mystery will always be greater than the reality.

Let me explain.

There are those relationships in life that seem just exciting enough. You know the ones. Where you’ve danced around each other and lightly flirted and maybe, maybe you’ve acted with a little risk. And who knows? Maybe there’s a thrill there worth the leap. But perhaps the real excitement is in the active storytelling you participate in. It’s in the things you make up in all the space between. The exhilaration comes from what we imagine, not what the reality is. If you take the step, if you try and make it real, you risk making it into something it’s not.

You break the glass that way, you know. You shatter the image you spent so many days or months or years cultivating and all of a sudden you can’t put the pieces back together quite right. They won’t fit anymore, they’ll look different, and instead of being excited about the opportunity for change you’ll be disappointed it wasn’t what it once was. You’ll find a mild frustration in yourself that you chose to shatter the glass, but you’ll be even more disappointed in the glass itself.

How dare it look different? Why would it deign to change? How could it not know it would end up this way?

I get it, the frustration there. The maddening ache that accompanies finding out something isn’t what you thought it was. So why do that to ourselves? If we have the thought, even the slightest inkling, that killing the mystery and taking the leap would ruin things, why do it?

Often enough it’s because hope wins out, and I’m not saying that some days it shouldn’t. I’m saying there are times (and we tend to know the ones) where we should keep things as they are. Our lives are not romance novels or epic films or even the songs that we listen to. They are wonderfully simple and genuinely uncomplicated until we make them so.

Please don’t hear me say there aren’t things out there you shouldn’t take the risk on. Some things, some people, you should leap for—as far as you can. But some you should let be what they are—a wonderful fantasy, an incredible dream, a relationship a bit far from reality.

So for now, let’s not make it real. Let’s live in dreamland for a little bit longer. Let’s not allow reality to set in—not yet.