Categorically Romantic

Reconciling a realistic romantic history with high hopes for your current love affair can be a difficult task. You can't (or shouldn't) come into a full blown romance without thinking that this could be The One, and you can't (or shouldn't) look to any romance in your past that lasted forever. Only that rarest of relationships, the first love that lasts forever, is free from this dilemma. (and then there's the risk of feeling that you missed something by never playing the field.)

One attempt of mine to deal with this quandary is to find something that made each of the "Big" relationships unique, and its history unrepeatable. By categorizing them, I feel as if I've managed to honor their place in my memory without risking my romance with Mo. So, in roughly chronological order, and without a single name dropped, here are the some of the categories I've experienced:


Past Loves in Boxes--
Honoring or Blaspheming?
The First Romance:
You're young, you're silly, you're at summer camp, you're in love. You're sitting next to a lake, passing a fireball back and forth without using your hands. You want this one to be the one and only one, but years later you might realize that it's good that it didn't work out that way.


The Start of the
"Simple Romance",
Illustrated 		The Simple Romance:
You're a little bit older, you've had a few more romances under your belt, when WHAMMO! this one hits you like a ton of bricks. It's not that you demand perfection from this person, it's that this person is perfection; hard to describe fully if you've never been there yourself. You're stunned that this person wants you as much as you want this person, and sometime thereafter you're stunned when the relationship can't survive after geography intervenes.
Years later, you're less stunned but still hurt that that spark of perfection can't return, even when that person has a crush on you and you want to give it a chance.

The Next Romance:
Life goes on after that Simple Romance, believe it or not. Not to be confused with a rebound relationship, the Next Romance can usually only occur after the mourning and healing have both taken place. The world regains its colors, food regains it flavors, and sitting by lakes is beautiful again.

The Complicated Romance:
It's on, it's off, it's always ambiguous. Periods of passion and mutual fascination pepper stretches of cool disinterest. There's enough emotional baggage to stock a luggage store, and you may never know what this person feels for you. The other person might now know themselves. WARNING: the phenomenon of sproradic romance, of a vast amount of partially tapped potential, may cause you to pine for this person for years. This is bad for you and annoying for them.

The Shadow Romance:
The one that takes place during an off period of the Complicated Romance, and is never sure if it can overcome the shadow. Made even stranger when it's the shadows of other relationships of both people. It's not always easy to convince each other of the validity of the feelings during these times, but the feelings can be as strong as in any other romance.

The Friends-to Romance:
The romance that evolves from a friendship. The trick is overcoming the reason why the friendship was only a friendship for so long. (I've seen too many cases where a good, worthwhile friendship is strained by one of the people wanting it to be more.) You miss out on some of the mystery "how do they feel about me" paranoia, but knowing what and who you are getting more than makes up for that.

This last one is the category Mo and I are in, and there are a lot of times when I think this last one might just be The Last One. I can't say for certain that the Friends-to Romance is the one that's going to work for everyone, but if you can pull it off you're in for a wonderful time.

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