By Chiara Atik for HowAboutWe
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you meet someone, you're attracted to them, but, but, but. He's too short for you. She's way too conservative. His use of emoticons concerns you. She seemspretty attached to her cat.
These things aren't dealbreakers, per se, but they're things you notice, things you sort of worry about, things that make you wonder if maybe, despite your attraction and your compatibility and the fact that you're having a good time, you should just throw this fish back in the sea.
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If you're anything like me, you can sometimes spend an absurd amount of time and mental energy listing pros and cons to your friends on GChat, trying to figure out if the use of the idiom "What the buckets?" is outweighed by the fact that he or she is a really good kisser.
In an interview with The Frisky, sex expert (guru? sage?) Dan Savage makes a really good argument for dealing with all these annoying issues up front, and then (here's the innovative part) letting them go. According to Savage, the quirks or issues that annoy you are simply the price of admission to hang out with someone awesome: you pay, and then you forget about it.
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He explains:
"You have to identify the things about your partner that annoy you, that you can't change but are worth getting over because the rest of the package is wonderful. And then you stop bitching about those things. You say, "This is the price of admission. I'm going to pay this price to ride this ride." And you don't go off on it over and over and over again. You suck it up. And be aware that your partner is also sucking it up. Price of Admission - that's a big one!"
Pretty brilliant, right?
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The things that bother you in the beginning of a relationship aren't going to magically stop bothering you. So just, come to terms with it at the beginning and then get over it. I like this as a theory because it's sort of like giving yourself permission to stop being picky, or hung up on every single little thing.
People are rarely perfect, but they're often awesome. After a cost/benefit analysis, you might find the cost of admission is a better deal than you think.
