It's amazing to have a boyfriend but it's nothing like what I thought it would be. I mean that in a good way but when I look back at my thoughts on relationships before I started going out with my boyfriend, I realise how ignorant I was about the dimensions of relationships.
One of the mistakes I made was to think that you could draw up a list of features you wanted in a boyfriend. In a way, I was right because there are some features that a man has to embody in order for me to be attracted to him e.g. academic, intelligence and a nice personality. Nevertheless, there were other features, that I now realise, are not as important as I thought they'd be such as brown hair, a love of languages, being of an older age than me, etc. Ultimately what makes me love my boyfriend is that he exposes me to new ideas and thus gives me a new perspective on life, he makes me laugh and I can share everything with him. There can be simple features that you desire in a boyfriend but you won't necessarily be able to predict the qualities of the person to whom you are best suited. Although I knew that a prospective boyfriend's personality was always more important than their looks, I only fully understood the truth of that when I started going out with my boyfriend because my attraction to him was and is still purely emotional. Nevertheless, now that I've got to know his physical side I have become more attracted to his physical features.
I also did not realise just how much time relationships can take up in your life. I used to think you could divide up your time with your partner as you could your time with everyone else but in the first few months of our relationship, as is often the case, we always wanted to be with each other, so I'd take a while to reply to messages and do other chores when we were around each other and when we weren't together we'd often spend a lot of time texting each other or talking to each other on Facebook. It even got to the point where I felt like I was behind on everything because we'd been spending so much time together. Now that we've been together for more than a year, we have more time for other things but our relationship still takes up a fair amount of time as we naturally want to spend time with each other. Thus, I now realise that it would be a bad idea to go out with someone, who you only half-heartedly love, because the relationship has to be worth your time if it's going to take up a lot of your time.
My other misconception was to think that you should wait for certain periods of time before reaching the different stages in a relationship. I used to think that you should know a person for two months before going out with them and that you should not start having sex until you've been together for at least 4 months. However, my expectations were soon challenged when I met my boyfriend because we got on really well the minute we started to get to know each other to the point where we knew a fair amount about each other after 3 weeks, so that was the point when we got together. It also didn't take long for us to start having sex because after we'd mastered the art of kissing, we felt a big urge to do it one day when we were kissing in the shower, so we ended up having sex 2 months into our relationship. I guess I'd still say that you should have spent enough time getting to know the person before getting together with them but you can't specify the times when the events should take place because different arrangements work for different people, so it's hard to generalise.
People can often spend their time overcomplicating the ideal arrangements for relationships when they've not been in a relationship but it's often a waste of time to do so.
