The Condom Manufacturers Are Having a Good Quarter

Mille and his Sarah are spending every possible moment together. They work at the same place, they’ve been eating Chinese food, and they are personally responsible for a meaningful uptick in the quarterly earnings of at least two condom manufacturers. It’s that phase—the one running entirely on novelty and skin, where the only real thought is the next time you get to see them, where every evening is a chance to discover something new and the morning after is just more of the same good thing.

Meanwhile, John and Mandy ended it. Both of them wanted out, which is the least complicated version of how these things can go. In the days after, John committed fully to the goth scene—the wardrobe shift, the new crowd, the implicit declaration that whoever he becomes next won’t resemble who he was. I recognize the instinct. When a relationship breaks, a door you didn’t know was there suddenly swings open, and you walk through it before you can think too carefully about where it leads.

I watch all of this from what feels like a higher altitude—a relationship measured in years now, past the butterflies, past the phase where an accidental touch still registers as an event. The steady state. But I know the elevation is partly an illusion. Problems find you anywhere you’ve planted yourself, and all that apparent calm can collapse fast when something actually goes wrong. What long relationships teach, I think, is that endurance is its own form of devotion—that showing up on ordinary, boring days is the real test, not the charged beginning.

You can’t choose your phase. You move through all of them—beginning, middle, end—again and again until you eventually land on the person you stay with for good. Between now and then there’s just the heartbeat and the nerve it takes to keep going through each one.