On Relationships

I am trying to put into words my understanding of the well-known adage that all relationships need work.

Increasingly I have come to consider the human soul as more liquid than immutable; highly susceptible to chameleon-like changes, but often in the most hidden and even unconscious of ways. We are often never jolted into drastic change, but rather, slowly and unknowingly conducted to change in a series of mild uncomfortable but often minor irritations that gradually and softly provoke us to alter.

We are the most sensitive and wondrous of instruments, and we are never really the same person, every day, every hour. We are changed daily in miniscule ways, like the ocean lapping upon the shorefront of a beach and slowly morphing its curves. Some of these ways don't matter; some never surface; some occur in temperemental and obnoxious bursts; and others occur through the sorest of failures.

The bottom line is, if people don't grow together, they grow apart. Just as species divided by natural phenomena in separate environments grow into distinct species over time, unable to mate or co-exist as before (speciation, for those who care!) Small deviations can cause the greatest of chasms, and their fatality arises precisely because their subtlety makes them easily disguisable, or overlooked. In my observations about societal discourse, most of our relationship mistakes occur not because two people purport or plan to hurt the other, but because they have grown so separate that the hurt is an inevitable result of jamming together two discordant or non-conforming entities. Loving someone is not necessarily a guarantee of eternal devotion, but a promise to strive for said eternal devotion - a start, a benchmark, a spark that must still be fanned continually in order to grow.