Writing this column has been a major pain in my ass. There's a certain amount of pressure associated with knowing it's the last one.
Somehow, the end of anything seems significantly more important than whatever took place before it. It's as though it isn't the flavor of the meal that matters, but the taste left in one's mouth once one has finished eating. We spend 99 percent of our time in the middle, yet we dwell on the one percent that is the end.
Perhaps nowhere is our obsession with the end more pronounced than in regards to sex. We obsess over orgasms. Did you come? Did she come? Did you come at the same time? Did you come inside of her? Did you come once or twice? You would think that sex was nothing more than the brief orgasm at the end.
Sure, getting off is important, but it's a mistake to overlook the rest of the sexual encounter. You can have horrible sex and still have an orgasm, or have great sex and never come. You can't reduce the meaning of your sex life to a string of five second "money shots."
Just as we let orgasms overshadow our sex lives, we let break-ups determine the lens through which we view our ex-partner. We rate the quality of the person we dated and the entirety of the relationship on the inevitably miserable last chapter. If they hurt us at the end, it completely negates anything positive they may have done before that.
So sometimes it can feel pointless to spend time and energy being nice to our partner. The most emotionally-distant jerk and the great lover who always cooked breakfast are sealed with the same fate once they break your heart. If they dump you, they're an asshole. Period, end of story.
But as tempting as it may be to hate our exes for hurting us, doing so ruins our chances of pursuing a friendship with someone with whom we were once very close. People whom we once swore we couldn't live without, we swear that we will never speak to again. Because all we let ourselves remember is the end, we overlook the amazing friendship that was once there.
We tend to forget that the end of anything is nothing but a point on a very long line, a date that we can put our finger on. Like May 23, 2004.
The time you've spent with your friends in the last week probably seems exaggeratedly important since it may be the last time you are all together. But it's not this past week that's going to make or break whether these friendships are for life or just a four-year distraction.
As much weight as we place on the end of a relationship, it's the middle where everything happens: sophomore year, when your best bud spent three hours helping you decide what to major in; junior year, when they handed you a beer and listened to you complain about how you chose the wrong one; or spring break, when you were having too much fun to care (or even remember) what you majored in at all.
Although the end may be when we verbally acknowledge it, the middle is where it happened. As much weight as we place on goodbyes, those moments are the same as all the others; it's just that they happen to be the last. If we could learn to value the middle as much as we value the end, we could find more fulfillment in all aspects of our lives.
