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.

When Couples Fight

I consider myself a fairly... sociable man.
...
Let me start that over:
I consider myself the type of guy who gets along well in large groups of people.
...
No, that's bullshit, too.
Ok, last time:
I can stand being around maybe 3 people in a social setting before I start to think bad thoughts.
Yea. That's the ticket.

So I spend a lot of time with small groups of people. A clutch of friends. Conversations exist one at a time, and everyone gets their turn. It's less awkward this way. Like playing a game of catch instead of running along the inside of a batting cage trying to catch every ball fired out by the pitching machines.
The only problem with this is that a few of my friends are in Relationships. Yes, that is a capital 'R.' That's because they live together, and as such I often find myself in a house or apartment that is not mine, restricted in my actions and movements to a single room, and a select number of socially acceptable practices.
Not a huge deal. I never feel like a third wheel and I get the feeling (maybe a false feeling, but no one disabuses me of it, so I keep the hope alive) that my company is genuinely enjoyed. But some(often)times something happens which creates a layer of awkwardness so thick and viscous that it can't be cut with even the strongest, sharpest blade...
The Fight.
When a couple fights it has a strange effect on the rest of the room. It's like suddenly everyone is afraid to speak for fear of somehow making the situation worse. And yet the couple, now the center of attention, makes no attempt at calming down to spare everyone else their quarrels. It is as though they are saying, "Fuck you, world, our shit is your shit now."
Silence looms. Their voices rise, bolstered by the otherwise quiet room. Somewhere a man tries desperately not to sneeze. No one moves. God himself slows the movement of the universe and stays the hand of fate.
I am convinced that while a couple is fighting people on their death beds are hastened to their final reward because they try not to breath.
What the hell are you supposed to do when this happens? God forbid you try to be an arbiter of some kind, an emissary from a world that just wants to be able to open a fresh beer without feeling like they have been singled out.
The couple takes their fight so seriously, and brings to it such emotion, that it seems like sacrilege to try and do something else.
Don't leave the room. Don't enter the room. Don't eat. Don't talk. Don't think about eating or talking. Don't think about what would happen if you thought about eating or talking or thinking about leaving so you could enter again.
All conditions must be left exactly the same so that when the fight ends, the couple can emerge into a world that seems to have been paused. We are but a movie that the fight has interrupted, but now that peace comes again, we can press the collective PLAY button and get on with things again.
And thank God, because this is a pool party and Tim has been underwater for a good seven minutes.

But at least when you are in a large group of people you can glance feverishly between people. When I am alone during one of these raucous Relationship rows I have a feeling of intense dread. What happens if the relationship dies here. What happens if they leave the room and don't come back. At what point can I grab my shit and get out of Dodge? Is there protocol?

No. There isn't. Sit tight, shut up, pray they don't see you and drag you into it. Just remember, their vision is based on movement.

Probably the craziest thing about these fights is that they come seemingly from out of no where.
Picture the most innocuous activity possible - let's say staring at a wall with a picture of a smiley face on it. A couple is engaged in this activity with me next to them. We are enjoying ourselves when suddenly the man will say something equally innocuous.

Him: "Man, this is really getting good now."

Shit. Well, now he's done it. What has he done? No one knows. But for whatever reason, at this place and time, that was the exact wrong thing to say. Had he expressed Nazi sympathies he would have made a better choice of words.

Her: "So what, it wasn't good before?"
Him: "No, I was just saying it's even better now."
Her: "Why, because you had another sip of beer?"
Him: "Baby, I am just saying that this wall keeps getting better and better. Besides, this is only my second beer of the night."
Her: "Whatever, there's no need to get an attitude."
Him: "I'm not, I'm just trying to explain..."
Her: "You are drunk, I can't believe it, we have company over."

At this point I pound my fourteenth shot of whiskey and cross myself.
Did you see where this all went wrong? It was somewhere around the time they were both born.
As far as I can see, there is no way to avoid this type of thing. A joke about a priest and a rabbi will rapidly and horrifically morph into a shouting match about who is more worthless (note: in the end, they both are, because they are distracting me from the wall, dammit) or who has the worse addiction/bad habit/taste in chips.
Usually at the end of this all I am stuck sitting next to one of them (the victor? the vanquished? who knows...) as we sigh awkwardly and I steal myself for the final, painful moment when they ask, "Was I right?"
Fuck me, I don't know if you were right! I don't even know what you were fighting about in the end. At some point it sounded like you two were arguing the tenants of Zoroastrianism. Invariably I try to split the difference because I know no other way to work. You did this wrong, they did this wrong, you ought to stop doing things wrong.

My one enduring hope is that when I get into a relationship my girlfriend and I can only fight about important things. ("I am telling you, the relevance communistic Socialism died along with Lenin, and the only true way to operate a government in the modern world is through a Fascist dictatorship that melds itself with transcendental philosophies and a greater understanding of deist thought!") At least then people will be able to take a side. Or at least fake it.

Until then, I pray for the day when I am old enough to convincingly fake a fucking heart-attack.