Allowable screw-ups in relationships

Sorry for the absence. A few years ago I decided to only blog when inspiration hit me. Unfortunately, I'm not the most oft inspired individual.

So I've been exclusively dating a woman for a few months now. To follow my normal pattern, let's call her Zooey. It's been strange, going through this process. I'd been mostly single for the past year and a half. And before that I was in a relationship for eleventy-billion years.

I've found that there's a "dance" that both people perform in the beginning. You try to show them who you really are... but mostly the good parts. You try to share everything about you... but mumble through the skeletons.

We do this because a relationship in its early stages is a precarious thing. One wrong word, One bad move, and it can all come apart.

This, of course, is the most obvious on a first date. Think about it. You're sitting there at dinner having a nice conversation, when all of a sudden she/he brings up a taboo topic. Politics, sex, religion, ex-partners... it doesn't matter which one... she/he's committed a cardinal sin. The night ends and you decide not to call them back.

Why?

Because you can only gain so much interest in someone in one date. That's really what it comes down to. Let's say that for every positive date you have with someone, your interest increases by one "unit". And for every bad experience in a date, your interest lowers by one "unit". This means that you can only raise one unit in a date (usually being counted at the end of the night) but you can certainly dig yourself deeper and deeper by messing up.

Then there's the weighting scale. Becoming exclusive with someone can be worth at least 10 or 20 units. Then milestones like "I love you", engagement, marriage... these can shoot you off the chart.

But the negative side is the same. Your bad habits that the other person doesn't like? Continual deductions. Cheat on them? You don't even want to know how bad that is.

Ok so my point is that I've been thinking a lot about how certain things can be a problem if they happen early on, whereas they wouldn't be an issue if they happened a year into the relationship. I'm not going to share the specific events I'm thinking about but here's a perfect example.

Let's say you go out on a first date with someone and they "break wind" in front of you. That's probably a deal-breaker. But if you've been dating for 6 months and spend over 50% of your time together? Then it's probably happened and it's not a big deal.

So why is that a big deal on day 1, but not a big deal on day 180? Maybe because the other person hasn't gotten to know you yet. Maybe they are still deciding if they want to be with you or not. I don't know. This probably requires more thought.

Feel free to discuss in the comments some things that have happened to you either early on or later on, which fall into this category...