A lot of victims of abuse describe how it felt ‘boring’ to be in a healthy relationship after experiencing an abuse dynamic.
I was watching, of all things, Fate: The Winx Saga on Netflix and one of the characters – a mind fairy and empath – senses a guy at the school and becomes immediately interested in him. She explains that he sounds like ‘the absence of chaos’.
Peace.
She is experiencing peace after being bombarded by the intensity of everyone’s emotional experience. He’s calm and grounded, and I had this moment of “OH. I get it.”
Because it isn’t that we need to ‘get acclimated’ to a ‘boring relationship’
..it’s that we have to change what we find attractive, what grabs our interest, in the first place. And that starts, not by tricking ourselves, but by re-framing our perspective.
Being triggered and inexplicably craving someone immediately is not “passion”.
Chaos is not “exciting”.
Peace is not “boring”.
It’s not the Most Epic Love Story, it’s “high school drama”.
We can prove whether someone loves us by how they treat us.
If we feel overwhelming desire and attachment and longing for someone, but they are not patient, they are not kind, and they are not honest? Then it isn’t love. People that actually love and care about us want to treat us right. If for some reason they can’t or are challenged in that, then they are going to do what they can to protect us, even from themselves.
Randomly, I knew I was growing when I was watching Stargate SG-1 and out of nowhere thought “Damn, Major General Hammond is sexy AF with those ethics”.
Old me would have gone straight to Daniel as the nerd, or to Jack as competent and masculine, so I was completely taken by surprise. When we change our paradigm, what grabs our interest is different. (And it’s humbling to realize that my former attraction matrices were shallow; for example, just because society values “intelligence” more than physical appearance, it doesn’t actually make it any less shallow. Because it’s what someone does with their intelligence that matters; an intelligent person is not automatically better by virtue of being intelligent.)
I do want to acknowledge that the desire for intensity may not ‘go away’, but you can still meet that need in a healthy way with a caring partner, whatever that looks like.