Question! When communicating with your significant other, close friend, co-worker, random person on the street, bed buddy, or other acquaintance, do you try to start a discussion of your shared relationship:
     o Every single fucking time you talk to them.
     o Every second or third time you talk to them.
     o Once in a while.
     o Virtually never.

If you answered from category one or two, you are almost assuredly boring your acquaintance to tears (if only on the inside) each time you bring up the subject. Ripley's believe it or not, the enjoyment of discussing anything begins to wear thin after enough repetition, and this can be made far worse when zero new territory is uncovered between discussions. Incessant reiteration of the same old questions like "How do you feel about the relationship?" and "Are you glad you are in a relationship with me?" will make the answers ever more disaffecting to come up with. That is, it will have the opposite effect of keeping the other party actively interested in discussing the damn relationship.

Now, if you still have active interest in the relationship, as you must to parrot your metarelationship reasoning with such frequency, you may wonder what you should do to figure out what is happening within it. Fortunately, this is easier than it looks; just be stoic and see how things turn out over a few more conversations. This has the bonus of changing your score on the above questionnaire, possibly delivering you all the way out of the tedium zone. To put it in the words of Homer Simpson, "... when something's bothering you, and you're too damn stupid to know what to do, just keep your fool mouth shut. At least that way you won't make things worse."

On a related note, you may worry that the relationship is coming to an end before you want it to. There are a few clues for this that make perfect sense in context, such as words like "You're fired" or "I think it's time for us to break up" or even "Get the hell out of my head shop!" In the absence of these clues, be advised that your worries are quite possibly false -- if you do decide to pursue them in conversation, try not to do it often enough that they become wearisome.

This has been a public service announcement from somebody who's not generally bitter at all. Thank you and good night.

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