Bad habits – those suckers have resiliency.

Talk about staying power!

Days, months, years can pass, and against your better judgment (or your self-promises otherwise), you fall back into old patterns. Old habits die hard, they say, and never is this more true than in the world of romance.

Lust, love, and – dare I say it – passion, are hard things to forget.
We can physically move on, of course, yet there lingers formerly forgotten memories, banned thoughts, nervously resting in the subconscious of your cerebrum, anxiously awaiting to return as soon as the opportunity arises. And when it does – well, if I used horrific colloquialisms, I’d say ‘Whoa, Nelly’. Or ‘Hot Damn’. You get my point.

What is it about intimacy – whether physical or simply emotional – that serves such a lasting punch?

In relationships, we tend to remember only the good times. It’s a subtle form of self-preservation; after all, if we admitted to ourselves that we were with him for eight months more than we should have been or that he was cheating on you the entire time, we’d have to re-live the pain, humiliation, and anger all over again. Masochist, I am not.

And so we remember long, lazy Sundays resting in bed, the times when you’d stay up all night on the phone, just talking to hear each other’s voice, that time you both played hooky from work so you could eat homemade ice cream on the porch and waste the day away. You know, the trite, clichéd romancy-things that you see in chick flicks. It seems that even the passage of time cannot break those supernatant vines that curl around your heart, despite the wall you’ve erected.

Sometimes we find ourselves pushing the memories away, back to their home, the safety of returning them to the crypt of our past loves-gone-wrong. We find ourselves pushing others away, others that we like, that we could love, out of protection. “We hurt the ones we love the most, it’s a subtle form of discipline.” I’ve always loved that quote, yet only now do I understand it. But they missed something – we also hurt ourselves in the process.

Should we return to what once was magic but soon turned tragic? Like sailors being lured to their death by a mermaid’s song, are we hoodwinked into heartbreak by our selective memories and a dash of latter-day television-depicted romanticism? The line between fact and fiction becomes blurred when hearts are on the line, as if that romantic haze masks the truth. Basically, we believe what we want to, often at our own folly.

In a world full of farce, full of masquerade, full of facade, how do we find true love? Trial and error, perhaps? Learning from our mistakes? If that’s the solution, it requires us to not only LEARN from past mistakes, but to avoid them going forward. And that’s the catch 22.

Which brings us back to bad habits. Too many of us get married not because they want to enter a lifelong partnership, but because they’re eager for the stability (and the big party that a wedding often is) that is portrayed by marriage. Too many of us stay in destructive or loveless relationships out of habit, comfortability, or fear of being alone. Too many of us find ourselves repeating the patterns again and again, an endless cycle of pain and heartache. Too many of us can’t break these bad habits.

There’s programs to help us quit smoking, quit drinking, even to quit gambling. Our society is so full of these viceful addictions that it’s become almost commonplace to be in some sort of 12-step group. After all, we’re the after school special-inspired generation. Yet with all of these self-help opportunities, why hasn’t anyone come up with a program to help us quit hurting when love disappears?