You meet someone amazing, you go on a few dates, you fall head over heels in love. You’re so happy that you just can’t stop talking about it. It’s a story that I’m sure many of you will recognise, but how do we stop it before we get too bad?
When a friend meets some one new and won’t shut up about them, it can be so bloody irritating. At the beginning, it’s nice that they’re happy and you love to share in their joy but, after a while, you start to wish that they’d talk about something else for a change. You hear about that fantastic date they went on last week, how gorgeous his eyes are, how much fun she is. Everything you talk about can somehow be twisted round so you’re talking about them again. Every time you log into Twitter there’s a stream of them cooing at each other. At least you can hide their updates for a while on Facebook, but there’s no escaping it on Twitter. Every time they email each other, they tweet “I emailed you!”, and every day is filled with “I have THE BEST boy/girlfriend in the world!!!!”
However, although we all recognise this in other people and probably hate it far more than we ever let on, we never seem to notice when we start doing it ourselves. Every time our friends go on and on about their new love, we wonder why they don’t notice and it’s the same reason we don’t notice… love makes you irrational and stupid. I know, that sounds harsh, but just think about what you’re like when you’re at the head-over-heels stage. Would you believe anyone if they said that your partner wasn’t up to standard? Probably not. Do you ignore the rubbish stuff and just focus on the good bits? Definitely. Are you not quite yourself? Most certainly! So, how can we stop ourselves annoying all our friends at the expense of a relationship that we can’t quite see clearly about yet?
Well, the first thing is to keep being happy – just give in to it and don’t try and hide it. If you let all that happiness leak into other parts of your life, just remember that you don’t need to explain why you are so full of the joys of spring until someone asks. Just be happy. Next, try to make sure that you don’t ditch your friends for your lover too often and, when you do see your friends, try to remember the other news you have to tell them. There must be something else. Remember, if they want to know why you’re smiling so much, they will ask you. Even if they don’t ask, you’ve probably cheered them up with all that smiling.
Remember that you might not be great at making decisions right now – especially not life-changing ones – so try to wait a bit before deciding on something, and ask for advice from your most level-headed friends. If you manage to take time to stop and think, it might turn out for the best. If you are about to post a soppy Facebook status update, think about who you have as friends on there and whether you need to broadcast this to all of them. The same for Twitter. Write it, save it, read it again before posting. Sometimes it looks a bit weird when you read through it the second time.
Most of all, remember that the relationship belongs to the people who are in it. It’s kinda nice to have secrets sometimes, isn’t it? Little things that only you and that one special person know, but that no one else has a clue about. That’s the nice thing about keeping some of this stuff to yourself. Mind you, not that it’s ever that easy though!
This article was first published on BitchBuzz in 2012. Image via @Doug88888‘s Flickr photostream.
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