When To Give Up (A.K.A. The Balloon and the Cactus)

Far be it from me to say that love will never, in fact, conquer all.

Stranger things have happened in this world; Ball lightening, UFO encounters, successful white rappers, frogs falling from the sky...

Geronimo!

But at some point either in the experience or observation of a truly dysfunctional relationship, someone has to ask: At what point should this lame horse be made to headbutt a bullet?

This becomes a rather tricky question. It asks at what point optimistic romanticism becomes meaningless routine. At what point does the "We can work it out" Beatles jingle become the "Remember when I said 'I love you,' well forget it I take it back, I was just a stupid kid back then" Alkaline Trio anthem to idiocy?

I suppose one way to look at it is this: Are you happy?

Seems like a simple enough question. Being with someone either makes you happy or it doesn't. Being without that person either then makes you miserable or it doesn't. To me, at a very basic and quantifiable level, then, someone is worth staying with if you feel better when they are around and feel a little bit worse when they aren't.

Not to say that living without them is intolerable (we call that an obsession, children) but that you honestly look forward to seeing them again.

As such, a significant other is someone whom you like being with and want to see again. A one night stand is someone you felt better being with and hope never to see again. And someone you are miserable with and yet want to see again is commonly referred to as "a bad idea."

Beyond simply being a bad idea, this person can also end up being ultimately destructive.

You are miserable, therefore people don't want to be around you, therefore all you have to cling to is the bad idea, who sooner or later twists you into an unidentifiable shell of your former self that people want to be around even less.

This is what I like to refer to as "The Balloon and the Cactus."

Imagine, if you will, a bright balloon, filled with air and floating happily through the world. It's a playful, kindly balloon. One day Balloon meets Cactus, an aesthetically interesting thing covered in sharp quills that make it impossible to become intimate with (for the purpose of this analogy, imagine I am talking about emotional intimacy).

Yet Balloon is in love with Cactus, and though all of Balloon's friends tell Balloon not to get involved with Cactus, the two strike up a relationship. Balloon believes that love will overcome the obviously Bad Idea that is trying to make it work with Cactus.

Before long, Cactus's quills, which before were just their problem, have pierced Balloon, sapping the poor soul of their former jovial attitude and fun. Balloon is earthbound, drained of the thing's they loved, and Cactus remains unchanged. Cactus remains remote and unapproachable, but now Balloon too is worse for the wear and is trapped with Cactus.

See? Simple. Read that to children when they are growing up and see if the marriage rate doesn't fix itself a little higher in coming generations when people learn that sometimes you really just aren't meant to be together so stop trying and for the love of GOD don't marry them thinking it will change things!

(Author's note: Same thing goes for children and pets. You can't fix what's broken by adding more complicated moving parts.)

So the question then becomes, When do you know he or she is a Cactus? How far should you go before you realize that you aren't nobly fighting for love anymore? When does it make sense to say, No, this isn't working, and to remain with you will only destroy me and my life?

Above: Not someone you take home to mom.

At what point is it responsible to make a call as to whether you have found your future prince/princess, or if you're just going to be kissing a frog for the rest of your life?

Love me!

Time, I think, doesn't even factor into this question. Say I were to put a firm stamp on two months. If after two months we are still making one another miserable, it's all over. What happens when an unforeseen incident crops up two years into a perfectly harmonious union? Jump ship? No, of course not!

Time doesn't matter because a relationship is an ever-evolving organism. It starts off small, eating plankton and what not, then swims around and hunts more wily prey, then grows legs and climbs onto the land and then wings and takes to the air (Charles Darwin hates me right now).
So at any given point there will be a problem. First the tides might be working against you, then you might stumble while trying to work those legs, and then you might have trouble finding the right air-speed velocity to keep aloft. These are all parts of the process.

It's when you're still having the same bloody arguments you were having at the single-celled stage while trying to run and flapping your stunted wings then you have problems.
A year in, if you're still arguing about how you never hold hands enough or how you never do what the other person wants to do, you might honestly think about just ending this madness.

Even more egregious - in my opinion - is when one or the other of you flat out refuses to try to forge any common ground with the other. You're not sharing books, you won't give their favorite TV show a chance, she won't let you listen to your music in the car...
That's not a relationship. That's a hostage negotiation, and sooner or later you have to ask what you are getting out of this.

Why are you still in that thing? What is the point? What are you getting out of it? If 95% of the time you are flat-out suicidally depressed and 5% of the time you find yourself saying "Things have been really good recently" then you need to wise up and move on. If you say "They've been having a rough couple of weeks" at least twice a week, then there is a problem. The thing is that you have never found happiness. You have felt happy but you haven't been happy.

Do you know why mankind seems to think of the default of the world as having daylight? Because a majority of our lives are spent in it. That's the norm. If night lasted for 18 hours, then we would think night was the norm.
When your months-to-year-long relationship is still in the sea, and when you think the sun is a novelty, you know its time to GET OUT OF THERE.