Dating: Where Do You Go From Here?

Dating is that part of a relationship when things are just starting to blossom and everything looks rosy. You feel good whenever you’re with your partner and you always look forward to being with him or her. In fact, you terribly miss each other when you’re not together. Before you know what’s happening, you’ve fallen madly in love with each other, you feel carefree and on top of the world.

What next? Are you willing to take your relationship to the next step? Are you going to throw caution to the wind and let nature take its course?

Couples who’ve been together for a long time are often asked what makes their relationship stay strong after all the years that they’ve been together. Three answers always come up: love, compassion and unlimited forgiveness. In relationships, make-or-break issues will crop up. This is inevitable. It is both parties’ unwillingness to give up that keeps the relationship intact despite all the cracks.

What about you? Are you willing to take all the necessary steps in order to bring your relationship to the next level? If you want to go beyond dating and have a more permanent arrangement with your partner, do you have the spirit, the strength and the endurance to hold on and stay the course even through the unlimited bumps your relationship will encounter on the road?

What Kind of Love Do You Mean?

Couples who have just recently fallen in love with each other often think that their love for one another is static. They believe they have the ‘real’ thing – whatever that is – so they will be sure to have a charmed life together.

They are naïve. Love, used in this context, is not the love that lasts. It is attraction and infatuation, perhaps more intense than the usual variety, but just as superficial nonetheless. It is devoid of the depth and commitment that you find in love that lasts.

You see, true love is a verb. When you say you “I love you” to someone, you are promising “to love” that someone. It is a commitment to “to love” another person. It is active and it implies conscious decision. What are you going to do? I am going to love him or her. No matter what happens? Yes.

When naïve people say “I am in love with you” instead, then you are basically saying that I am in love with you now, but who can tell what I’ll feel tomorrow? After all, this is the static kind of love. It is love that may or may not stand the test of time. You are in love with someone because he or she is who she is right now. If the other person is no longer the same person tomorrow that he or she is now, will you still love him or her? I don’t know.

True love is a conscious decision “to love” and cherish another individual. It is not a state of being in love. Put another way, it is a commitment and a promise to be in love for the rest of your life.

Now if you have that real, committed and abiding kind of love – the love that is a verb not the love that is a state of being – then you can take your relationship to the next level.

Reality Check

Now, you may get the impression that love is blind, just as many poets and song writers have claimed. Remember that someone who promises and commits to love another person is someone who makes this decision consciously and with his or her eyes wide open. It is the “think before you leap” kind of love, not the “fly by the seat of your pants” variety. People who do the latter should not be surprised if they crash, as they almost always do.

A commitment to love, cherish and honor each other – marriage or living together – is not something you should do lightly. Before you make the commitment, you should first make sure you know what you’re letting yourself in for.

Consider everything that will be directly affected by the change in your relationship. You will have to learn how to keep the apartment neat for the sake of your partner. Your habit of leaving unwashed clothing on the floor and picking them up only when you can no longer see the floor, not using a coaster when you put a cup of coffee on the glass-top table, not returning the toothpaste to its proper nook after use – these may have to be curbed if you don’t want petty arguments. Are you willing to do that?

Your partner will also have unreasonable (at least to you they’d seem unreasonable) demands, irritating quirks and not-so-lovable traits. You’ll have someone living in your pocket and looking over your shoulder; someone whom you have to consider in your decisions when once you only had yourself to account to. Can you live with that?

Other questions you should be asking yourself includes: will I like it if I see his or her face every morning; do I see myself growing old with him or her (corny, but true); do I see myself happy with him or her despite all the things I don’t like about him or her and despite all the things I know he or she doesn’t like about me?

All these things will have to be considered before you decide to get married or live together. And only when you can still say the words “I love you” in the way it should be meant and in the context it should be said – then and only then should you take your relationship to the next step.

Notice that this is not blind love. Your eyes are open all the time. And you choose to commit in spite all of the things you know could and would go wrong.

One Final Note

One tip for all the ladies and gents out there who are thinking about taking their relationship to the next step: make sure you like talking to your partner and hearing what he or she has to say about things even if his or her opinions do not always jive with yours. A relationship between two people who don’t have anything to talk about is a relationship doomed to fail.