Habit Forming

After the "newness" of a relationship wears off - ANY relationship - the persons involved get more and more comfortable around each other. They know and accept the other persons idiosyncrasies, habits, and sayings. Spend enough time around someone and you'll begin to evolve ... very slowly ... to be more like them. This can be a very bad thing.

I know - not what you were expecting me to say, right? But it can be. Spend enough time around someone who always has a beer with lunch or dinner and sooner or later, you'll likely be doing the same. Hanging out with a potty-mouth will, nearly without fail, degrade your own language skills. Drive with someone who seems to have constant road rage and watch yourself boil as that guy in the Camry merges into "your" lane.

Sadly, it hasn't been my experience that the better habits of the other person in a relationship are as transferable. While one may be more AWARE of imbibing, swearing, or road-hogging just because of who they're spending time with, actually adopting those good practices into YOUR way of life - I dunno - it's just tougher to do.

The Awesome Boyfriend does things regularly that astound me. Where I want to hurry up, he waits patiently. While I acknowledge that the flaws in things I've created allow for uniqueness, he strives towards perfection in the smallest of details and rarely accepts good enough, especially in his own work. When I decide that something "just is that way", he cannot wait to research it just so he can learn more. Even today, when the TV was misbehaving and I had our cable provider walking me through a solution, I had to ask for him to stop searching for a fix on the Internet and come to help me real-time.

The thing is ... and this is still maybe the MOST astonishing thing I've ever experienced ... the "newness" between us is alive and well. My heart still quickens when he comes home from work, I still smile when I see he's awake next to me, we still laugh like children at the goofiest stuff, he still picks me flowers for no reason at all. So I dunno ... will I ever pick up his good habits? Only time will tell.

Ask me again in about ohhhhhhhhhh 45 years or so ...