Forever is too long to be with one person

Casual relationships, more like contractual agreements are slowly being normalised in modern-day dating and people no longer die tying themselves to each other on forever-for-better-and-worse terms.

Times have changed and relationships rarely hit the three-month anniversary time because people even break up after the first date. So why would someone be lonely for days on end, for years in the name of waiting for a forever partner when they can casually date for fun and social status, for sex and other benefits as they juggle to see if it can last or not?

Happily ever after is not as easy as ABCs. See, we can still have people in our lives when we want to, and when the time comes that one feels they’ve had enough of their person, they can drop them fast and furious and pick on the next available human that makes them tick.

Whenever, wherever. I know moral cops will yawn as they read this, but, don’t we all agree that there comes a time when relationships and marriages become more like prisons, and with any slight change they could break into small pieces? Does it really have to last till Kingdom come?

I don’t think we owe each other forever. We’re humans, not robots that use batteries and commands. Feelings grow, and like the usual mathematical curve, there are those high moments then the lowest of the moments.

It’s human nature to grow out of love, for whichever reasons one has. It reaches a time when the love of one’s life becomes a stranger in the night! So what happens when you grow out of love but you remember you’re tied up to this person by the vows and covenants you two made to each other? You remember your pastor, your family, friends and online in laws. You stay because? We are watching. Society is looking at you. Family expects a perfect union and the internet never forgets!

We should beware of succumbing to the debilitating feeling that because it didn’t last forever, it wasn’t worth it. In other areas of life, we know that ‘going on forever’ isn’t the deal (even when something is very good). Like, we don’t necessarily have to stay in the same house all our lives though we might really like one we are in; we’re not betraying it or destroying it when we recognise that for a range of reasons it would be wisest to go elsewhere.

Everyone needs to have an account of love which allows that a relationship can end without anyone having viciously or pathologically killed it prematurely. How we see the endings of love depends to a critical extent on what our society tells us is ‘normal’. If it was meant to last forever, every ending will by necessity have to be described as a horrifying failure!

But if we allow imaginative space for short-term love, then an ending may signal a deeper loyalty, deeper and more genuine love, not to setting up of a home and domestic routines, but to a deep appreciation and admiration one felt for someone for the period they were together. Sounds nice, no? We need to learn to walk away with a fair and generous sense of all that has been preserved and enhanced by the relationship not being forced to last forever.

True, there are those moments when it becomes overwhelming. You’re obliged to be transparent and truthful to your significant other. You need to be accountable in all spheres . You need to report back to your person what is happening where and why. Slavery, sort of. You have no time for you coz yeah, two became one. As the holy book says. This can be draining!

But because you promised to love and to hold, to kiss and lie with, to cry and laugh, for better for worse till death do you part, you’re supposed to stomach any little bull*** that comes with the union. You’ll be reminded of your vows in the middle of the night when the love of your life has an annoying cough and you need to cut short your sweet sleep and go get them drinking water to ease the effing irritating cough. If you just feel like it should end, end it and start all over again. Forever is too long to offer one person!