When you first start dating someone, they seem like the best thing to ever happen to you. Everything they say is the funniest thing you’ve ever heard. Every little thing they do for you is the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done. You can’t help but smile when you see them smile. You love how their laugh sounds. You love all their little quirks, like how they say your name or how they act when they get excited about something. You don’t want to spend any time away from them, and you can’t imagine your life without them, so you integrate them into your life as much as possible.

You start telling this person every little random thing about your life, stuff other people don’t know. Serious stuff, like about depression, anxiety, or insomnia, but also stuff like how you were obsessed with cows when you were 12, or like how you were such a bad swimmer as a kid that your camp counselor thought you were drowning. You introduce them to your family, they become friends with your stepdad. You share everything with them: your friends, your fears, your Facebook password. To you, your relationship seems indestructible.

As the months pass, you start to notice their flaws. Maybe they don’t listen. Or they’re late for everything. Or they forget things and you have to remind them of stuff all the time. At first, it’s cute, contributing to their quirks and making them all the more lovable. When you first realize that you find it annoying, you try to ignore it, because it’s easier, but of course, pretending everything is fine is going to lead to you resenting your partner. And talking about it will lead to fights. Eventually, you both realize that you’re not just not compatible, but sometimes, it just seems less messy to stick with it. This person knows your family, everything about you and your damn Facebook password. Aren’t you just supposed to be with them forever regardless?

Once the honeymoon period wears off, it’s exactly like that scene in "100 Days of Summer" where Joseph Gordon-Levitt is listing all the things he no longer likes about Zooey Deschanel. Their smile makes you feel nothing. You hate their stupid laugh. The way they wave their hands around when they’re excited drives you insane.

Eventually, the fighting gets to be too much. You’re not even happy to see them come home from work anymore. After talking about it, it’s pretty apparent they feel the same way. The best thing for both of you is to end it.

This person already knows everything about you. You can’t take that back. But you start having to disentangle them from every other aspect of your life. You have to tell your friends. You have to tell your family. You have to change your Facebook password. If things get particularly ugly, you have to unfriend them or even block them and delete all the pictures of the two of you, and then it’s like the past year - or two, or three - never even happened.

You let someone get so integrated into your life - and then you suddenly have to just take them out completely. The person that used to stop everything for is now the person you want to see or talk to the least. How weird is that?

The question is - is it worth it?