Ask Anahit: In The End
In this month's advice column, one reader asks how to feel chill in a relationship that feels temporary
How to be happy and normal in a relationship that you feel will end eventually?
Honestly, you are so real for this. No one gets the urge to be happy and normal more than me. I love to schedule in my happy and normal time, like it’s a deal I’m making with the universe: “I will be happy and normal right now and in exchange, you will let me be happy and normal.” Neither of us are very good at holding up our ends of the bargain, but I really understand this desire to Jedi mind trick yourself into a state that in reality can only occur when the circumstances are right. Sometimes the only way to feel like you have agency over your life is to try and control every uncontrollable aspect of it. You tell those serotonin molecules where to go!!
So listen. As much as I admire your tenacity, the question here isn’t really how to be happy and normal in this situation, but whether the situation is working for you. There are some people on this good Earth who I’m sure can feel fine in something they know won’t last. These people are either well-adjusted to the point of suspicion or delusional to the point of psychosis, but they do exist. Are you one of them? You can’t make yourself feel happy and normal if you’re the kind of person who finds endings unhappy and strange. I’ve never met an ending that didn’t make me want to kill myself so, as much as I have been – and will continue to be, because I’m stupid – in relationships that I know won’t last, I do know they’re probably not good for me! And that’s OK! Maybe you’re like that too!
Ultimately, none of us know what is going to happen. You might meet your soulmate and Wile E. Coyote might drop an anvil on them, or you might end up staying with your situationship forever because everyone else is taken and why not. Relationships are at the end of the day about choice, and people only stay together forever not because their love is stronger and more magical, but because they choose to. Who knows what your life will look like? You don’t have agency over the outcomes, but you do have agency over whether you stay in something that makes you anxious. Devastating news, but there it is.
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