One of the best ways to be continually unhappy is to think of relationships as random events, like meteor strikes or UFO sightings. When you think falling in love is like hitting the lottery, you’re in a perfect state of mind to get your heart broken.

Crossing your fingers and hoping the guy you love will want to stay with you forever is childish. It is foolish to wish for a man who will never get tired of you. If either of you are only in this relationship because you WANT to be, this relationship is doomed.

Nobody WANTS to stay in a relationship forever. That’s the reason people who love each other take vows. There are hundreds of good reasons to leave you. The only reason a sane person would stay with you until the end is to keep a promise he made.

I know this isn’t the story book romance you think you deserve. You can make it easier for the person you love to stick around by realizing that living with you isn’t automatically ‘happily ever after.’ Fairy tales are fiction. The prince won’t be smitten with you forever.

Let me offer a ‘poem’ that’s much more useful.

“I hope the next person who falls in love with you

can trust you to set aside your selfishness

and stay with them even when you don’t want to.”

Love is not a bolt of lightning. It is a decision. When two people choose to stay together, the relationship will last. Commitment doesn’t happen by accident. It doesn’t come from crossing your fingers and hoping ‘the next one’ will stay.

“Now, I will speak to the rest of you, though I do not have a direct command from the Lord. If a fellow believer has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to continue living with him, he must not leave her. And if a believing woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to continue living with her, she must not leave him.”

(1 Corinthians 7:12)