Being in love is one of life’s most precious gifts we can experience. We float on air with dizzying thoughts. The sky looks bluer, love songs on the radio seem to speak directly to us, bland food tastes delicious. We get butterflies, have visions of rainbows and dream of unicorns in our sleep. We feel connected to, and become one with, the universe. We start talking to our grumpy neighbors and mean coworkers because nothing can touch us in this glorious mental state. Everything rolls off us like water off a ducks back. Our heartbeats race the silence as endorphins are flying high with exhilaration.

But often the very same person that caused you so much joy can then cause you so much pain. The sweet becomes the sour. Where once you were flying high, you come crashing back down to earth. The tears of laughter turn to tears of sadness. When our beloved first falls off the pedestal, we try to prop them back up to their lofty status as we bounce between happiness and despair. Cracks appear where once there was an airtight bubble. We try to justify all these new flaws we now discover and deal with the drama as best we can. We wrestle in our minds how this downward spiral can possibly be happening after feeling such lovely bliss.

But we desperately want to hold on to this joyful feeling so we stubbornly fight back to preserve this euphoria. We do our best to convince ourselves we can make it work while simultaneously continue to suffer small setbacks. But the instability causes us to vacillate back and forth with the highs and lows; two steps forward three steps back. So much so, these mood swings parallel the behavior of drug addicts. We get tossed around like a small boat in the mighty ocean, each wave crashing our spirits and chipping away at our belief that we finally had found our soulmate.

At some point, you arrive at the realization that the pain exceeds the joy. You try hard to fix it but it likes squeezing a square peg into a round hole. It’s simply not working any more. The exasperation exceeds the happiness and this imbalance is no longer putting you in a healthy state of mind. You toggle back and forth for a while, perhaps a few weeks, months, even years. You make the assessment that there are too many issues to overcome, too much drama to deal with and you finally feel the fatifgue of emotionally going up and down like a yo-yo.

And that is when you make The Love Calculation: you begin to question whether it really is all worth it. You do the analysis of risk versus reward, joy versus pain, return on investment. None of it is adding up. Your heart wants to stay but your mind says it’s time to go. Fear is a powerful weapon and we are all afraid of change, afraid to let something so familiar go. It is an internal battle in your head but deep down you know the right answer. Even then, the path is not easy as to execute on it often is a different story. We are often tangled in a messy web in matters of love and to remove yourself from all the common threads demands courage and conviction. You may have to change habits, patterns, even friends. But the desire for inner peace amidst the emotional trauma carries you forward; it is the wind beneath your wings. Once you start the process, the other pieces start to fall into place as you break away from all the entanglements. There will be doubt, angst, anxiety but you forge on to finally find a new path.

Onward and upward…