Relationships in an Hour

*The following data was taken from 05/22/09, and it has not been updated to our current time.

Really, my loneliness can be boiled down to one thing alone--my perceptions of time.

I'm twenty years old. Twenty years and a few months ago, I didn't even exist. I entered into my first relationship when I was seventeen. It lasted for three months.

17.5*12=210
3/210=1.43%

That first relationship comprised about one and a half percent of my entire life, and that's not even counting the time that passed afterwards.

My second relationship started shortly before my eighteenth birthday, and lasted until the summer before my twentieth (about 20 months).

19.5*12=234
20/234=8.55%

Now, 8.55 percent is a considerably larger chunk than 1.43, but 8.55 percent of my life is like 5 minutes of an hour. My first relationship was less than a minute.

1h=60min
60*0.0855=5.128
60*0.0143=0.858

Taking all months of relationship into question puts us at 23/234 or 9.83% (5.9 minutes). Taking all months of relationship into my entire life puts me at 23/243 or 9.47% (5.68 minutes). That's less time than there are commercials in an hour long TV show.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to deduce that the majority of my life has been spent "alone" (quotes signify that I've never been literally alone but you get my point).

Looking at the numbers, I'd say the sense of loneliness or longing that I'm exhibiting is quite ludicrous and presumptuous. Of course, different definitions of time could yield different results. If we count only the years that I was interested in girls (excluding some of my childhood, of course) the minutes to the hour ratios are quite different. The first relationship comes in at 2% (1.2 min) and the second at 11.49% (6.9 min). Taking them together runs 12.568% or 7.54 minutes, still just under the commercial break line.

The next argument follows that I could only truly understand the lack of relationship after being in one. Okay, well that changes percentages drastically. Now we're talking about 23/38, which is a whopping 60.5%! That's a 36 minute timeslot!

I understand that this entire post is more than a little tedious, but the point I've been trying to make is that time is a flexible construct, depending on how we look at it. And, as time is our usual benchmark for life events, it only makes sense to explore our feelings as they change and develop through time.

And average world live expectancy is 70 years.

The thing is, my longings, my desires to have someone to hold or whatever, they're chemical. They're a part of me in order to propagate the survival of our species. So unless God has a plan for me to have a companion, I might just be better off living in a cave.

But love is more than a little bit insidious. It's wonderful, and addictive, and once you've had it you'll never ever feel it unnecessary. It's the sweetest poison around, and detoxing is as painful as it gets.

The experiences I've been through and my reasonings here have led me to believe firmly that it is not better to love and have lost than never to have loved at all.

FML