When a relationship gets old, it’s incredibly frustrating. All your feelings of excitement and happiness are replaced by a dull agony. There are no surprises anymore, nothing to look forward to. You used to have such high hopes. Now it’s become just another part of your daily ritual. But you can’t leave it, you’ve already spent so much effort on it. Against all reason, you hope that somehow your relationship will magically refresh itself. Which inevitably leads to you asking yourself, “Why can’t it be the way it used to be?”
Well, things can’t ever go back to the way they used to be. Things change, and we have to move on. But that doesn’t mean we have to just give up. If the relationship is going to change for the better, it’s up to us, not the other party or by chance. But how do you do it? You get up off your lazy ass, make a plan to fix it, and follow it step-by-step. It’s not easy, obviously, and in the end it still might not work out. But knowing that you are actively doing something about it makes all the difference.
J.Bean has fallen out of love with her hometown of San Diego, California. She feels suffocated. She can’t go anywhere without seeing the same people over and over again. For one of the largest cities in the United States, San Diego feels like such a small town to her. So instead of letting her relationship with SD wither and die, she has decided she is going to try to fall in love with it all over again. Over the month of August, she will take on the 30 Day experiment, which will include activities like speed-dating, midnight kayaking, and performing in a slam poetry competition. If anything, these experiences will help her gain perspective towards her relationship with San Diego. Then she can decide where to go from there.
We have no way of telling what’s best for us. The choices we make and even the things we want might ultimately cause our undoing. It’s difficult to filter out all the noise, whether it’s from other people or our own uncertainties. But we do have a fighting chance to succeed, in love and life, if we choose to take it. In J.Bean’s case, she’s going to take a chance. She’s going to discover, on her own, if San Diego is still the right place for her. If it’s not, at least she’ll have fought for it. But if she finds over the next month that San Diego might hold more adventures for her than she ever thought possible, she might just fall in love all over again. And all we really need is love.