Were you the guys that ordered a wall of text? It's hot!
There are benefits to both, at least where I'm concerned. I'm an independent person; I like doing things my way, I do not like the conceptions tying yourself to a person can do to a relationship with them, and I generally avoid serious relationships altogether because I invest myself extremely heavily into people I'm close to while exposing my fleshy, delicate back to the objects of my affection, and most people seem to have "STAB STAB STAB STAB" as their first impulse when faced with such a situation, in my experience. I was more or less dragged into my current serious relationship despite piling reasons as to why it may not work out. My other would not have it and cheerfully declared me theirs anyway. Bear all of this in mind for the paragraph after next. I kind of shrugged and went along with it at the time.
The above said, a serious relationship can be extremely rewarding. Depending on how seriously you take such things and how good your chemistry with them is, they become what feels like your other half, what makes you complete. This person does that to me; I'm still filled with giddiness and excitement when they're around, nearly a full year since we became "official". They've told me they feel much the same way I do; that I feel right, that I feel like "home", that without me things wouldn't be as good as they could be. They want to be with me as long as I'll let them, they want to wake up next to me, come home to me, grow old with me, have kids with me, something that normally seems repulsive to me, but with them, seems like something I could actually enjoy, partly because it'd be something I'd share only with them.
On the other hand, they also cheated on me recently. At literally the first opportunity presented to them to date, as it turns out, because they're an impulsive idiot under the right (wrong?) circumstances. They then hid it from me until confronted with the evidence I found of it.
For a number of reasons that I'm not going into here, I've decided to try to forgive them; I feel that what we would lose should I break things off with them would be greater than what I gain in an attempt at justice or vindication. But it also illustrates one of the most horrible risks of such a bond, the threat that no matter what they say, no matter how much they love you, no matter how much like "home" you feel to them, there may come a time when you mean absolutely nothing to them, and the threat that such a thing could taint your relationship for the rest of your life, if it lasts that long. It's been the most emotionally trying and painful thing I've faced to date, nearly two months later, because it was also the first time a relationship had been wonderful. It wasn't perfect, no, but it didn't have to be. I'd never felt so sure of anything in my life, and yet there's a new pointy object in my back despite my decreasing need for having one on hand, and it was put there by someone that managed to make me love them more than anything in my life up to now, partly through their sheer force of will.
But despite my newfound lack of trust for this person, I mostly believe them when they say they're sorry, that they didn't understand at the time what they were doing, and that they didn't fully appreciate what we had together until they were at risk of losing it. So I have to open myself up to this person again, more or less hand them another knife and trust them not to use it this time, because I don't want to lie awake one day and wonder what could have been if I didn't. They aren't getting a third chance, so they'd best make the most of this one if they're not just stringing me along for as much as it gets them, but if they aren't, then we still have so much to enjoy, and gain, in this thing they've dragged me into that I've ended up being incredibly happy they did.
Do I have any regrets about the decision, made despite my independent nature, my discontent with serious relationships, my past of being betrayed (even by them), and having to condition myself to ignore my recently acquired desire to look over my shoulder just in case? No, actually. I didn't need this person to feel complete, but now that they're here, they've created pieces of the puzzle that result in a picture that involves them beside me. That's what love ultimately does: creates a bigger picture. You don't need it to be complete before, but once someone special shows up, once you've let them in, and they you, they complete you from then on, possibly for the rest of your life, even if they are one day gone from it, but until then, you're no worse off. The question for me in regards to this person then becomes whether I want to acknowledge that the new pieces are there, and despite the risks, the answer is yes. The picture just wouldn't look right anymore otherwise.
