Box of Chocolates

By   |  February 25, 2009

box-of-chocolatesIt is a truth universally acknowledged that life is like a box of chocolates.  But what about dating?  What’s that like?  Well, as it turns out, it’s not that different.  In honor of the annual food edition of the UCSF Synapse newspaper, we here at Love Dub International Headquarters have worked tirelessly to bring you this fully researched (list of references available in Swiss bank account deposit box) explanation for why a long term relationship is also just like a box of chocolates.

Think back to the last time you opened a fancy new box of chocolates.  Assuming there isn’t a note to another person inside (see winner of story contest from last week), it’s very exciting.  There are a seemingly unlimited number of options and they are all new and fun and waiting to be explored.  And, best of all, you don’t know what’s inside them.  Every new bite can lead to a pleasant surprise you weren’t expecting.

This is, of course, like the beginning of relationship.  Everything is fun and new and you can spend hours and days just talking because there’s so much to discover.  Of course, every once in a while you might take a misstep, like biting into that piece of chocolate that looked so good from the outside but turned out to have cherry soaked apricot crust on the inside which tasted kind of like a mix between burnt umber and snot.  But then you just go brush your teeth and try a new one.

Some boxes of chocolate come with a little map telling you what’s what.  And sometimes we come to a new relationship with a map, of sorts.  We bring our old relationships with us.  This can be a good thing, at times.  But if we do too much comparing, the old relationships can stifle the new.

And so it is with the chocolate map as well.  For some reason they always have some drawing on the map that doesn’t match up exactly with any of the pieces in the box.  It kind of looks like the one you really want, but it also kind of looks like the one you’re deathly allergic to.  And so you’re left faced with humankind’s great dilemma.  Do you risk anaphylaxis for the chance at a really good piece of chocolate?  And all the while you aren’t enjoying any of the other wonders that the box has to offer.

After a while the box doesn’t look quite so attractive anymore.  It’s filled with empty chocolate holders and scattered pieces of half-eaten chocolates and spit out apricot mush.  There’s still some good stuff left in there and you still like spending time with the box.  But you’re also starting to wonder if this was really the best box for you.  Maybe another box would have had better chocolates inside.  Maybe it would have had a more accurate map.  Maybe it would have stayed exciting longer than this one did.  Maybe it would have even stayed exciting forever like Willy Wonka’s everlasting gobstopper.

And so it is in what we call the maintenance phase of the Love Dub biopsychosocial model of stages of relationship change.  The relationship has reached a plateau.  There are reasons to stay, not the least of which is that you know it pretty well.  You’ve probably figured out how to avoid at least some of those anaphylactic pieces of chocolate.  But also you can’t help but wonder if this is really “it”.  Because if it isn’t, man oh man, you don’t want to spend a couple years languishing in it only to have to start all over again like the Obama team vetting candidates for cabinet posts.

And then comes the end of the box of chocolates.  And this can go two possible ways.  Option one:  That ache in your right lower quadrant is telling you that you ate too many, too quickly (well, either that or one of those pieces of apricot curd got stuck in your appendix and now you have acute appendicitis).  You take a look at the remnants of the box and you think, yikes, I don’t want anything to do with another box of chocolates for quite a while.  Then you go look in your fridge and realize that while you were busy spending all your time with the box of chocolates all of the nutritious veggies you had in there went bad, and now you’ve got to go wash out the fridge and make amends to your roommates.

On the other hand, option two is that you took your time on the box of chocolates, and in between chocolates you mixed in some nice fresh veggies and spread your time around.  You look at the box of chocolates and realize that what you thought was the bottom was really just one of those false bottom things they use to separate layers of chocolates.   There aren’t new flavors in there, or at least not too many.  Most of them you’ve already tried.  But you realize that, you know what, they were pretty good flavors.  And besides, they might taste even better the second time around.  So you decide to stick with your box of chocolates and trust that it’s the best one for you.

Of course, it’s possible that you actually don’t think it’s the right box for you and you just don’t have the courage to get rid of it because you’re afraid you might not find another one.  You’d be wrong, of course, because there are a whole lot of different boxes of chocolates out there.  Fear of not having one for a while is a really bad reason to stay with one you don’t feel right about.

And so it goes with relationships as they enter (or decide not to enter) the long term phase.  As a disclaimer, this happens to be a phase that we here at Love Dub have very little (read: none) experience with.  But, on the plus side, we aren’t receiving any monetary support, resort vacations, or pens from anyone in a long term relationship.

It is a similar decision to that faced by fourth year medical students as they prepare to make their match list.  Do you take your significant other into account when making your list or not?  If you don’t, you are effectively breaking up.  If you do, you might as well get married.  That’s why middle of fourth year is marked by lots of breakups and lots of engagements.

It is very possible that residency matching is also like a box of chocolates, but the data is still being collected in that double blind randomized controlled study.

Stay tuned for a look at how having kids can totally mess up what used to be a perfectly good box of chocolates, and also for a look at the question of whether or not it makes any sense in this day and age to stick with one box of chocolates forever.

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