When we first discover love we develop all of these ideals of what it is, or rather, what it should be. Think about your first experience. It is all sunshine and roses. Everything the light touches takes on a golden glow, the air is filled with a sense of magic. You dream about your white picket fence future and truly believe one day it will happen. You imagine that that is the way life is supposed to turn out.

And then life happens. We grow up. We get hurt, we become broken, and we grow from those experiences. We understand why poets and songwriters refer to love as a rose, with its budding blooms, blood drawing thorns, and eventually its dying petals. We put ourselves in compromising situations, we do things 'for love's sake' that we would never otherwise do. The smart ones carry those experiences with them, they learn from their mistakes. But they become hardened.

At a certain point, we come to realize that all of those ideals and expectations we had at the beginning are naive thoughts perhaps inspired by watching too many romantic comedies and TV dramas. The reality of it isn't the same.

The more brains we have, the more our relationships become complicated. Maybe the girl who follows the old school pattern of staying home, cooking, cleaning, and producing children while her man takes care of her has it easy. All she has to do is perform her tasks and be there with open arms when he comes home. But what about the girl who follows her own path, with a career and dreams for her own individual future. And the guy who loves that girl because he admires and respects her independence and ambition. They both think for themselves. Yet that means when it comes to being together, they need to find some sort of common ground and compromise.

This is the reality of a modern relationship. And with that comes derivations from the path we think we are going to follow. We realize those ideals we had in our mind about the perfect relationship may not be even feasible.

I am starting to think that, as we evolve, we are not meant to be monogamous creatures. Human beings are changing. Our life mission is no longer to procreate and simply survive. We need more. We have dreams and aspirations that become our top priority, and we leave the white picket fence dream for something that may or may not happen along the way.

The word "love" becomes taboo. It is a topic reserved exclusively for sappy music, and a term used loosely by teenagers. Maybe we find the guy or find the girl, but we don't change our lives in order to make love fit in. Rather, we do the opposite. We compromise love in order to make it fit with our lives. Our relationships become complicated, with their own unique sets of rules and habits. Exclusivity becomes rare, and as we are constantly moving about, harder to adhere to.

All of a sudden, the girl who once imagined she would never look twice at a man with a girlfriend, finds some way to justify having an affair with a man who wears a ring on his finger. Somehow it has become ok in our society, to the point that we don't even feel any remorse as long as we aren't the 'guilty party'. But the guilty party may think he or she is equally justified for whatever reason. And the one being cheated turns a blind eye, because that is the compromise they had to make in order to stay in this relationship. They accept infidelity, because they don't want to ruin the best thing they're likely to ever get. Whether they realize it or not, they are coming to terms with settling.

If this is the way things are to be, do we even bother trying anymore? Let us forget monogamy until we realize that we are at a point where our biological time clocks start ticking faster, and only then seek to "settle down" with someone with whom we can find enough common ground to tolerate each other for the remainder of our lives as we raise our children. Why make our lives more complicated than they need to be?

Think of what we would be able to accomplish if we took all of the energy that we put into making a doomed relationship work, and put that energy into creating the best life possible. Get more work done, build stronger relationships, do things that make you happy. Enjoy life while you're young and beautiful. Have the freedom to cut any ties to bind you.