Three Year Step Back?

You may have heard of the Seven Year Itch. The Seven Year Itch is a concept that happiness in marriage decreases after seven years. It even has an extensive Wikipedia entry.




In my personal experience, there has been a three year step-back. In my first real relationship it was logical, high school and college differences, people growing up and more individual. When it happened in my marriage, it was more intense. It hurt more. It had a domino effect that hurt others and still impacts them today. But it was also clearly a bad mix, a poor match of personalities and souls.




When it happened in the next relationship, I attributed it to distance, complications, my inability to be more open to communication and expressing my feelings. But the idea of it being around three years did creep in. To be honest, I tried to blame the idea that I had an expiration date in relationships as an excuse for my failures in this particular one.




The next time it happened, I think I caused it because I thought it was going to happen. That's confusing. Right. I get that. But I was enjoying this relationship and then I felt I had to get really serious because three years was on the horizon. I even told her I had a three year trend. Which I can't imagine was a fun thing to hear. So I panicked. I went too hard, too mushy, too commitment. Then in reaction, I pulled away. Dating a yo-yo is complicated and confusing. So that ended close to three years as well.




Since then, years now, nothing has come close to three years. Until the past month. I'm closing in on three years with my dog and due to some work changes, my schedule is different. We are around each other at different times than she is used to.




As I have been home more during the day, her routine has been upset. She is confused why I am home during the day. Why I work nights and come home not ready for bed. So she's started falling asleep on the couch and not coming to bed. She will lay in her kennel at the previously normal time that I would leave in the morning. Then come and whine at my feet as I work on the computer, confused, maybe worried that I forgot to go to work. In short, closing in on three years, this relationship is changing as well.




In reality, I know that this current chaos has more to do with a change of routine than the perceived three year itch. But with extra time on my hands, the mind finds extra reasons to worry. My brain is constantly looking for connections, for reasons, for explanations for why I have not achieved the things I think I should have.




The vast of my interpersonal relationships are flawed, strained, distanced at best. Is this because of the natural flow of life and relationships? Or could it be that I expect things to end and create a self fulfilling prophecy that creates that end even when it shouldn't?


According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a self fulfilling prophecy was coined in 1948 by Robert Merton to describe “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true." Could it be possible that I have used this self fulfilling prophecy to consistently undermine my relationships because I expect them to end eventually? It's not the worst idea I've ever had.


Could it also be that this period of underemployment, working more hours at more jobs but less income overall has impacted my self perception and self worth, even to the extent that I think my dog is drifting away from me, just as every other close important one on one relationship has eventually?


Last night, I couldn't sleep. I lay in bed. My dog soundly asleep on the couch. Was it because she was tired of me? Had I driven her away just like everyone else? Or was I making a mountain out of a mole hill. Perhaps she was just sleeping upstairs because it was ten degrees warmer and she fell asleep two hours before I even began to attempt to try.


After thinking too long about the possibilities, about the seemingly obvious existence of a three year step back in my relationships. I fell asleep.


Yet, in the morning, as the sun finally broke through, barely breaking the cloud cover of yet another cold and snowy morning, the pup was there. Sometime in the night, she had curled up next to my side. We lay there as I scratched behind her ears and sighed. And I thought, perhaps the terrors of the dark of night, perhaps those ideas that I was unlovable, that I had an expiration date on every relationship, maybe just maybe I was mistaken.


Or maybe she was just hungry. With this much paralysis by analysis, every day is an adventure.