The 5 Things That Can Get In Your Way When You're Falling In Love

We all know how the falling in love story is supposed to go.

I mean, it's always the same, right?

Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy and girl have some sort of crazy fight. Boy and girl love each other so much they get over crazy fight. Boy and girl live happily ever after.

That is the narrative we're taught. The only one.

Of course, your heart can get broken into a million pieces, but that's usually a result of something someone did.

You cheated or he cheated. You fell out of love or he fell out of love. You lied about something huge or he lied about something huge. Something like that.

The way it's supposed to go is that two people fall in love and they stay that way until someone does something to ruin it.

But what happens when nobody does anything to ruin it? What happens when life just gets in the way of what could have otherwise been a perfectly wonderful fairytale romance?

There are lots of hard parts of growing up. But I think that's one of the hardest parts to come to terms with.

Sometimes being totally and completely in love just isn't enough. Sometimes, life takes a giant dump on your fairytale romance before you even get the chance to do it yourself.

Sometimes being totally and completely in love just isn't enough.

Work schedules that don't align

"Work schedules." It sounds so lame and trivial, doesn't it?

Can something as mundane as your nine-to-five actually get in the way of something as magnificent as LOVE? We don't want to admit that it does but, alas, it does.

I mean, love conquers all...but how are you supposed to maintain that all-conquering love when the two of you are working so much that you barely have time to see each other?

Or, maybe it's not the two of you working tirelessly. Maybe you're working million-hour work weeks and your love is sitting around at home waiting for you. Maybe you're the one sitting around while your loved one's working the million-hour work weeks.

Either way, that leaves plenty of time for building resentment and not a whole lot for budding romance.

Long distance

So you met the right person in the wrong place. It happens all the time. And the part of us that's taught that love is all you really need to make it wants to just forget all the logistics and GO FOR IT.

But, unfortunately, sometimes love just isn't enough.

Although now, more than ever, it's easy to make it work for two people to make long distance bearable. There's FaceTime. There's nonstop texting. There's phone calls. Not to mention the fact that it's easier than it ever has been to just hop on a plane and go see each other as much as possible.

The real problem with long distance comes when you can't find the light at the end of the tunnel.

But the bottomline remains that you can't physically be with the person you love. And, eventually that's going to turn into a problem.

See how I said eventually there? Yeah, you see, long distance can work between two people who really love each other if it's temporary. But the real problem with long distance comes when you can't find the light at the end of the tunnel.

If there's no end in sight, the relationship starts to fall apart no matter HOW much the two of you absolutely adore each other.

Conflicting values

You two could be absolutely crazy about each other, but your idea of a relationship is monogamous and his is more polyamorous.

He could be the absolute love of your life, but you could want three children and he could never want to have kids. The two of you could be SOULMATES but he could not believe in marriage and marriage could be a non-negotiable for you.

You see where I'm going with this.

Even if the two of you have off the charts chemistry and are absolutely crazy about each other, the relationship is never going to work if your ideas of what a "relationship" is and where you'd like it to go are completely different.

The past

Unfortunately, you can't control what happened to someone before you ever even came into their life.

As much as the two of you would have had a fairytale romance in another life, the fact of the matter remains that his parents had a terrible divorce, and the residual trust issues from that have left him totally horrified by even just the thought of love.

Or, as much as the two of you would have been total SOULMATES in another world, the fact of the matter in this life remains that your ex cheated on you, and you're not going to get over those trust issues any time soon.

A relationship has its best chance at lasting when it starts off on a totally clean slate. It's hard to make even THE BEST romance work when you already start off with the odds against you.

Bad timing

Ah, love's mortal enemy: bad timing.

You meet the right person at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Maybe you met him when the two of you were living in completely different countries. Maybe you met when you were still married to someone else. Maybe you met when you just weren't mature enough to be in a relationship.

The point is, you met someone who could've potentially been THE ONE but the timing just wasn't right.

It's one of the most common relationship destroyers. And yet, no one warns you about it, just like they don't warn you about these previous issues that can get in the way of your true love.

But now that you know them, you can be better prepared to fight against them.