Real Love is Boring
Hear me out
My husband never gave me butterflies.
Falling in love with him felt right, but it didn’t feel the way I expected it would.
On my way to meet him for the first time, I felt nervous. When we were apart, I felt excited to be with him. But when we officially became a couple, I mostly just had a lot of nice, warm feelings.
Some of those feelings were strong, but they were different than the intense ones I felt for some other guys.
I expected to feel butterflies when I fell in love because I had drunk the Kool-Aid.
I took sips of it throughout my whole life because I loved romantic comedies and romance novels. Obviously I knew they were over the top and unrealistic, but some of the ideas about love seeped in anyway.
Romantic narratives need adversity to keep us interested. They need ups that come crashing down. They need lovers who have recurring conflicts.
That’s why they have girls who just need to show their Prince Charming they’re worthy of his love. They have couples who fight in ways that almost break them and who make up just as hard. They have guys caught in love triangles who will convince the girl to give up the comfortable, easy life with someone who seems perfect on paper because he can show her a flashing glimpse of a passionate life she can run away to.
Those tropes make sense because they make the story more exciting. We need all that tension to keep turning the page. But they also normalize the idea that love involves conflict, hurt feelings, and fleeting moments of intensity instead of constant feelings of comfort.
But the strongest Kool-Aid was the one I brewed myself.
Our brains are wired to respond to all the wrong things sometimes.
When I studied psychology, the first things I learned about was behavioral conditioning. One of the established principles of conditioning has to do with the way rewards are doled out.
If your behavior never results in a reward, you give up trying to get it.
If it consistently yields a reward, you become complacent about it. You know it’ll be there when you want it so you don’t give it too much thought.
But when the reward is uncertain and you only get it sometimes, you’ll work harder for it. If the reward is big enough, chasing after it can become an addiction.
That’s why we keep pulling the lever on a slot machine — because it pays off just often enough to keep us going.
It’s also why we go after fuckbois, emotionally unavailable guys, and men who string us along — because they do the same thing.
Toxic relationships do it, too. Being in one feels like being on an emotional roller coaster that messes with your head and messes with your heart.
The Rush of Relief
The relationship that best exemplified that for me is the one I had with James.
I fell in love with James quickly. Everything about him seemed perfect. And we had such lovely, sweet, beautiful moments together.
It didn’t take long before it deteriorated.
Those sweet moments we spent flirting awkwardly, lying in his bed after we fucked, and doing dumb teenage things together were replaced by a pattern of him ignoring me unless I gave him everything he wanted.
He closed himself off. Instead of talking to me when I went to his place, he would spend the entire time on his computer chatting with other people. I would try to get his attention and it wouldn’t work. I would just sit and stare at the posters on his wall, trying to think of a way to win him back.
If he never gave me anything, I would have given up and walked away. If the affection had completely dried up and he had lost all interest in me, I might have lost interest in him too.
But he was still interested when I gave him sex the way he wanted it. And I gave it to him because when we fucked, he would touch me again, he would be sweet to me, he seemed to appreciate me.
Those small moments of affection felt so incredibly intense. Not because they were amazing on their own, but because they gave me relief. It was like the rush of finally taking a drug I had been craving. It was less about the affection and more about my worries leaving me all at once.
For those brief moments, I felt reassured. I stopped thinking he might not like me. I stopped thinking I might not be good enough for him. I stopped thinking he might leave me.
The way sex and his touch combined with that relief gave me some of the strongest hormonal rushes I had ever felt. I was so grateful for him taking away my worries, anxieties, and sadness that I almost forgot he was the one who gave them to me in the first place.
I mistook that emotional release as a sign of love. I mistook the churning anxiety in my stomach when he was distant as a symptom of my love for him. I thought my obsessive craving for his crumbs of affection was just a normal part of being with someone you were meant to be with.
Comfort and Certainty
Meeting Mr. Austin changed my mind about what love is.
Our relationship had its ups and downs, but it wasn’t a roller coaster.
We clicked immediately and there wasn’t anything complicated about it.
There was no drama. There were no games. There were no big questions. We just liked each other from the start and let each other know we did.
We spent a lot of time together and became a part of each other’s lives.
It was really mundane. We spent weekends lying in bed watching TV and having sex. We cooked for each other and shared meals. We listened to music and talked for hours. We gave each other goodbye kisses before heading off to work. We took late night trips to the drive thru when we felt impulsive.
And we both really fucking liked that. We were tired of uncertainty. We were tired of being in relationships with people who sometimes acted like they could take us or leave us.
I didn’t crave his love the way I craved it with James. But that’s because you can’t crave something unless you don’t have it.
When I was about six months into my relationship with Mr. Austin, James messaged me out of the blue.
I was happy to talk to him again, but my feelings got complicated when he started flirting with me.
Mr. Austin was the open relationship type, so I had explicit permission to sleep with other people. Flirting with James wasn’t an issue. Following through on it wouldn’t have been either.
The problem is that this was the guy who had spent months emotionally abusing me. After all that, I still felt drawn to him.
I felt drawn in part because old habits die hard — even the bad ones. But talking to James also made me realize just how different my two relationships were.
A part of me was tempted to see what it would be like to go back to him because he gave me feelings I never got from Mr. Austin. Maybe if I saw James on the side, I could get both. I could have my cake and eat it, too.
My current relationship was calm, steady, and stable. With James there was passion. There was intensity. There was fire.
But another part of me realized that those were all just nice words I used to paint over some really toxic relationship patterns.
In the end, I turned down his suggestion to meet up. I’m glad I did because I might have been sucked right back into the same old damaging behavior. Because that’s the thing with toxicity — it poisons everything it touches.
Run Away from the Butterflies
My husband doesn’t give me butterflies, and it’s because he just makes me feel good.
Over the years I’ve learned that those butterflies were my gut telling me something was wrong or that I wasn’t getting what I needed out of a relationship.
And every time, I went against my gut, thinking I was following it.
I mistook my need to confirm someone’s love for me as a sign that I loved them.
I mistook obsessively thinking about them as a sign that we had something meaningful, when really it’s that I couldn’t figure them out because they weren’t giving me clear signs about how they felt.
I thought what I felt was love because it didn’t feel boring.
I didn’t know that real love feels more like satisfaction. It’s like the warm feeling of being satiated. It’s something you can get used to but definitely notice when it’s not there.
You can create passion when you’re in love. You can find ways to get a little more excited about each other. You can have date nights, make time to flirt, be more seductive.
But mostly it’s just comfortable and makes you feel safe.
And that’s a good thing.
I’ve seen plenty of people get caught up in roller coaster relationships. I’ve seen them feel that passion, that obsession, and those butterflies. I’ve seen them hold on to the belief that they’ve found the truest, deepest, most intense love there is — and if they could just overcome all the obstacles, they’d have their soul mate.
I’ve been that person, too. More than once.
But I’ve never seen it end well. Those obstacles never disappear — they just get bigger.
All of the lasting relationships I’ve witnessed started off boring and stayed boring.
None of them would make a compelling drama. It wouldn’t be a movie worth sitting through. It’s just not that great of a story.
Unless it’s yours.
If you’re feeling that anxiety churning in your stomach, listen to it. Trust your gut. Run away from the butterflies.
Real love doesn’t make you frustrated because you can’t get a straight answer from your partner.
Real love doesn’t make you feel dicked around.
Real love doesn’t have you calling your friends so you can try to figure out what the fuck his deal is.
Real love doesn’t make you question whether you’re good enough or worthy of it.
Real love is boring. And the sooner we realize that, the faster we can find it.
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