How to Survive "Getting By," or: Virginia Woolf's 4-out-of-7 Rule

Sometimes relationships are endangered not so much by hurt feelings and arguments, but by the belief that if we aren't passionately in love with our partner 100% of the time it isn't love. It seems silly, but there are many people who will leave a relationship as soon as the hot passion cools, rather than explore what it means to be intimate with someone you know. I have a friend who posts one of two things on her Facebook: 1) pictures of her in bikinis with duck lips, and 2) absolutely nauseating quotes about "true love." There's this particularly terrible one from marriage counselor Johnny Depp: "If you love two people at the same time, choose the second. Because if you really loved the first, you wouldn't have fallen for the second."

'dafuck? That is the worst advice ever, Johnny! Your broody, only-get-better-with-age eyes don't make it true. And it sums up all relationship problems, ever. That is not the way to build healthy relationships, it's only an excuse to hop from person to person, following your whims. There will always be someone new and hot, who you will connect with in some amazing way. You will write letters about Moby Dick and he'll write you a poem and when you see him on the subway, reading with his cute little glasses, you will want to rip his clothes off right then and there.

But, hello! That does not mean you don't love your partner. This isn't an either/or, and even if in your small little mind, Johnny, it MUST be an either/or; a new infatuation is probably not worth ditching your established relationship.

In these cases, I prefer to take my relationship advice from Virginia Woolf. She knew what's up. In a diary entry on marriage, she said: "Life--say 4 days out of 7--becomes automatic; but on the 5th day a bead of sensation (between [partners]) forms which is all the fuller and more sensitive because of the automatic customary unconscious days on either side" (p97, A Writer's Diary, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, 1954). This is how marriages/partnerships survive, Johnny. Every once and awhile we all want a little Vita Sackville-West, because we are (especially today) addicted to the new, to variety; we are obsessed with "love," especially the falling into it, those "Call Me Maybe" buoyancies; but a lasting relationship requires the understanding of the beauty in the four-out-of-seven rule.

And sorry to say, but not really too sorry, sometimes an "automatic customary unconsciousness" day might actually consist of weeks of cold, sexless "getting by," but that will end. It will be broken with a beautiful dinner, looking across the table at someone who understands what makes you laugh, and wants to see you happy. A person who has seen you at your most childish, and I don't mean that in a "You make me appreciate the world like a child!" I mean, "Stop slamming doors and face this problem like an adult!" Someone who has stood by you while you vomited your guts out and made you feel like Violetta, not Jersey Shore. Someone who you have fought with and thought everything was over, but realized all it takes is a little work and a lot of maturity. It will be broken on that fifth day, or week, by the arrival of a disappointing sex toy that he can turn into an amazing sexual adventure. But whatever does it, a bead of sensation will form and you will feel alive in your vital, complex, sexy relationship.

In addition to our addiction to love, we are equally obsessed with being happy all the time. Baseline is no longer evenness, it is happiness. And if we aren't "happy" we feel sad, sometimes desperately so. Acknowledging that sometimes "getting by" or surviving the day-to-day does not equal unhappiness is such a struggle. It is hard to be still with unhappiness, or what I now unfortunately think is unhappiness, but it doesn't last for long, and the good times mean more than the "getting by" periods.

Johnny Depp, I urge you to read The Ethical Slut and Portrait of a Marriage. Even if you don't want to open your relationship, it will be helpful to read and understand that desire and even falling in love with someone else, doesn't mean your relationship is over.