One of my crushes does a workshop on this, and when I signed up for it I didn’t expect it to be what it was….yet I needed every word and experience in that session. I would get the name of the workshop wrong so I am not typing it. The gist of the session though is the concept that most of our relationship lives are spent not in the highs or the lows but the flat earth plateau. That spot in a relationship where you aren’t chasing the high of NRE. That spot in the relationship where you aren’t managing a crisis. The regular degular daily mundane repetitive where the only thing you have to focus on is not becoming stagnant. That is the part of the relationship you do not see on network TV or on the IMAX screen yet it is the part of the relationship where we spend the most time…if we are fortunate.

This is the point of the program which is the most unfamiliar to me, the plateau.

When I look back at the relationships which mattered, almost none of them had mundane in them. The closest was John, and he skews that curve because he was used for a specific purpose and never just for my affection for him.

The romantic leaning relationships don’t have mundane.

There was lots of mundane with Bonnie and Clyde but I didn’t have to maintain a sex drive with either of them.

Very soon upon arrival in California the mundane will be a thing. It’s actually something I look forward to having, after all it will be a ‘new’ experience. It is also something I worry about. As I type this my brain says I can invent a crisis where there is none, but this is not totally that.

Living the regular is a new thing for me and something I will need to learn. Living the regular with him and the little one is something I will need to navigate. The 3 of us being who we are makes it extraordinary, but the mundane will arrive.

The little one is simpler in the sense how we interact is seamless in many aspects. There are still things I need to learn about her though, and adjustments since the little one I will arrive to is different than she was last summer.

The Daddy person is going to go through a lot when I arrive. My landing will bring many things to a head and all of them won’t be pretty. A part of me wants her to love him enough, respect what they had enough to make this less painful for him, yet I don’t see the path to that.

She will be meeting the 2 stone wills of determined people and I don’t think she can weather that.

I also ask myself what happens when I am no longer the respite, I am the primary. That can alter a relationship as well, yet with the two of us specifically I feel we will not have the issues I’ve seen play out in the past. I know that I am committed to the role, and he’s remained. It should be that which pulls us through, and I trust in that.

That is where the last 2 years of practice will help. Staying in the roles over this distance requires a lot of reminders, process, focus. We will have a brief ‘honeymoon’ of celebration that distance is no longer an issue but we must quickly go back to work to build the future we promised one another.