It’s isn’t a criterion we are foolish enough apply to any other area of our lives. If we enjoy a book, we don’t expect that we’ll have to keep reading it ad infinitum. If we enjoy a joke, we don’t think we should be made to hear it again and again. We may dearly love a job, but we don’t for that matter believe that we’ll have to stay there till the end. We can adore a house, and still need – at a certain stage – to move elsewhere.
Yet this enlightened, commonsense acceptance of term limits seems not to penetrate the one area where its absence can prove especially lacerating: the romantic sphere. Here, pointlessly and needlessly, we labor under an invisible societal edict dictating that things must last until we expire or else cannot have had a jot of value to begin with....
