Puzzle Building

Relationships of all kinds are built on a number of factors. Each factor is a piece of the emotional puzzle that is a relationship, and each contributing piece helps build up the final image. If all the pieces go together, and all the joints are sealed, your thousands of tiny factors become one beautiful picture. The problem: the boxing company accidentally gave you half the pieces to the "guy" puzzle and half the pieces to the "girl" puzzle. Sucks to be you.

This is how I've come to view relationships. They are a puzzle that has gone horribly horribly wrong. To begin with, everything is always fine. You dump out all the pieces, sifting through them one by one, and slowly you start putting everything together. As the months or years of building this puzzle go by, you start to notice that something isn't right. Not everything is coming together as it should be. Then, as you spend more time together building that puzzle of a relationship, it finally happens. You both realize, not always at the same time, that you are building two entirely different puzzles.

This is where relationships diverge. There are two ways to deal with this, and neither of them are very pretty.

There are the perfectionists, who sadly will never be able to sustain a relationship, healthy or not. These people will realize that their two halves of the puzzle are different and immediately stop building it. They'll run away from their work, taking their half with them in hope of one day finding the person who happens to own the other half of their puzzle. Bad news? There is no other half.

Then there's the improvisers. Their two halves of the puzzle become a challenge. It is no longer about building the same puzzle, but rather finding a way to jam the pieces together so hard that they will be forced to form one large, usually jumbled puzzle. There will be points where the halves are going to look awful together, and a lot of the time the pieces that boarder each other will encounter a lot of friction, but in the end, these people will share something great. They will have an entire, completed puzzle; one they built themselves and together. Bad news? It's gonna be ugly.

Which are you?