I don’t care if it doesn’t work out in the long term, though. I mean, yes, I care, but I’ve resigned myself to the idea that it won’t happen. And there’s something rather liberating about that, actually. I can actually look at you and say “This joy is temporary. This thing — whatever it is — is not here forever, so I might as well get out of it what I can while you’re still around.”
Rarely do we allow ourselves to just kind of wallow in the pleasure of something, but to not appreciate things fully when they are guaranteed to be temporary is almost a sin. You lie in bed knowing that the moment they get up from under the covers, it’s not going to be the same. So you hold onto their naked body and enjoy the fact that, for now, they are still lying next to you.
Because maybe relationships don’t have to fulfill everything for everybody. Maybe you are right in wanting less, and I am being overly demanding in wanting something serious. We are filled with these ideas that we are guaranteed some kind of romantic happiness, that the universe owes us a person who wants us in the way we want them, but maybe that’s ridiculous. We aren’t even guaranteed a tomorrow, and there isn’t much sense in denying ourselves the pleasures we could be experiencing because we imagine we’re being chaste for some reward which will never actually come.
So be mine, just for today.
Don’t listen to the nagging voice at the back of your head which insists that every romantic gesture must be followed by an even more serious display of long-term care.
We can enjoy each other’s company, even if that means two different things for each of us. We can pretend at the kind of love we might have had in another set of circumstances, treat each other with the velvet gloves that people who are more in love than us do. We both know how to do it, we’ve both done it before. There is nothing wrong with dressing the sex up with a bit of romance, even if we know it’s just a few props littering an otherwise-blank stage.
Wouldn’t just a day be nice? We could do romantic things for each other, even if we know it’s not a permanent display of more serious affections. Sometimes it’s just nice to make someone else feel good for a minute. I want to do romantic things with you.
- Charlotte Green, thought catalog .