"He's very enthusiastic, but this relationship is moving too fast for me."
"She wants us to move in together, but I'm not ready yet. It's too early for me."
I hear sentences like these once a fortnight, and they always raise in me the same ancient Chinese expression:
Are you serious?
Have you listened to yourselves properly? The pace is too fast for you? Anyone would think you'd just finished infantry basic training and were sick of keeping to a schedule. Calm down and let me throw a cold bucket of reality at you:
In a relationship, especially if it looks like becoming a serious relationship, you have to hurry, or at least to speed things along.
Let me explain:
People enter a relationship with all kinds of unrealistic and plainly dangerous fantasies — the "twin soul" myth, for instance — and when each of us imagines his dream relationship, I've noticed that we don't only imagine the sublime virtues of the ideal partner; we also have a rosy fantasy about the pace at which things will progress.
And do you know the thing? It isn't that you have a fantasy about a fast or slow rate of progress, twenty kilometres an hour or a mad gallop through built-up areas. It's worse than that. You would like things to progress "at your own pace."
What exactly is your pace? Nobody knows, your current partner doesn't know, and between us — even you yourself don't know.
Actually, you do know. I've listened to a great many single women and men and I think I've managed to formulate for myself the infantile rule that dictates their ideal rate of progress in a relationship: "Every time something in the relationship is uncomfortable for me, we stop, and we continue only when I feel it's comfortable and safe now."
Is there a more idiotic sentence?
And if your partner too clings to that rule, then you are in for a road full of potholes, an unsynchronised dance in which you keep treading on each other's feet, and in practical terms: within a month of the end of the lustful infatuation you will separate, because "it just didn't flow between us."
It's true, you have your own pace of life, an order of psychological operations you got used to in your adult years, small personal habits, private oddities only you can contain, and daily rituals you are addicted to.
And from all of them you will have to part, or at the very least express willingness to give up some, and to open the rest to negotiation.
Why? Simple, because those marginal things are… marginal. It isn't worth sabotaging the efforts of building a relationship for their sake.
A relationship being built is a very painful thing, like breaking in a new shoe. It's painful because it demands that you make changes in significant chunks of your identity, because now your precious individual identity has to be reorganised and become a shared identity. Now you are also "the boyfriend of…", and later "the husband of…", and if you decide to part with contraception, you'll also be "the father of…", which is an earthquake altogether.
Does it sound far-fetched to you? Talk to people who have been married more than ten years; they'll explain better than me how it feels and why reality requires it.
So I said that you have to reshuffle the cards in your definition of yourself together with your partner's deck, and agree to be part of a new and unfamiliar structure in the coming years.
And worse: you'll have to do it fast.
You'll have to hurry.
Although they sold you that some twin soul is waiting for you somewhere at the end of the path, although you were raised to believe that you are a unique and special flower who will one day surely realise himself before the astonished eyes of the world, at the "right" time, it is my unpleasant duty to inform you that it probably isn't going to happen.
The world will not wait for you. She will not wait for you, and even if she is with you at present, you will not be able to stretch her patience indefinitely.
You aren't ready to commit and settle down? Rest assured, my friend, you will never spontaneously run into a sign that "shows" you that now is the right moment. There is no such moment.
Life is not a moment. It isn't even moments; it's a continuous line that does not stop for a second. Your road together will continue in any case, whether you are strolling arm in arm through a romantic city, or stuck in traffic on the way to collect a passport that will let you fly to the romantic city.
Hurry, my friend, hurry. Part quickly with the things you and I both know are not matters of principle. You need three cups of coffee in the morning to be friendly to your environment? Make do with one. You can't understand people who don't shower immediately after sex? Say thank you that someone is willing to have sex with you at all and also contributes a loving hug afterwards.
And one more thing — part with those things without a price tag and without book-keeping. Don't expect her to repay you in the same coin a second and a half after you have made the gesture.
Because in practice, you made no gesture and did nobody a favour.
Only yourself.
Because you have started to grow up.