How good is your relationship with your significant other?
How happy are you?
These are subjective questions that are hard to answer straight. It might be that you don’t know what “happy” means, and there doesn’t seem to be a simple or universal way to define it.
Good news is – we don’t have to worry about defining “happy” to figure out if we are stoked or not to be in a relationship. In fact, you just need to do one simple thing:
Answer, “How did you two meet?”
I knew that my relationship was going down the drain with my ex (focus: EX) when a friend of mine asked me how we met.
When we first got together and I was irrevocably smitten with him, I couldn’t wait to tell someone how we met. It was the most movie-like, innocent little love tale. But later, when I grew to dislike him, resent him, and was unsure of how much further we had left, I would crunch it down to a limp summary: “He worked at this restaurant I used to pass by on the way home from work,” and simply left it at that.
When you tell someone the story of how you met the other person, you usually have to say some good things about them, like “I thought he had the most striking face; I knew he was it the moment when I met him.” If you’re having second thoughts about someone, you’re going to squeeze all the magic out of that and say what I would instead, like, “He seemed like a cool guy.”
When I told the story of me and my ex, I stopped smiling. I stopped acting out my first reaction to seeing him, when my eyes grew wide and I excitedly texted my friend immediately saying that I met a terribly cute guy and that I knew I wanted to date him on the spot. Instead, I took out all the flair, the details, and the spark of the story, because in a way, our relationship no longer had any.
The [relationship] stoked meter
If you’re not sure how much you like the other person you’re with, ask yourself right now how you’d answer if someone asked you how you met and got together. Are you ready to jump on a sofa à la Tom Cruise and shout how gobsmacked you are to have been lucky enough to have met your now one and only? Or do you feel your lungs shrinking at the thought and hear a rush of excuses or complaints about why things are different now than before rushing to your mouth? Put those feels on the scale of the “[Relationship] Stoked Meter.”
Scale of 0-5:
0 being “no hype whatsoever”,” 3 being “chill/whatever,” and 5 being “utterly stoked”
If you’re not stoked (Stoked Level: 0-3), or it’s hard to recall the memory fondly or without wincing, there’s a problem, and it’s one that needs to be talked about if you want to save the relationship (or just let it run into the ground… whatever).
But if you are (Stoked Level: 4-5), that’s a good sign. Perhaps you can test your significant other by having a mutual friend ask them when you’re out together so you can get a feel for how psyched they sound recanting the story of how you both got together / fell in luuurve.
So, tell me, does it work for you? Is the Stoked meter an accurate way measure your happiness with your s/o? Has it applied to those in your past?
Hope you’re all “hyped,” and no worries if you’re not – the sooner you know, the better…
P.S. you can also tell how not over someone you are if your level of “stoked” is quite high when recalling the story of how you met an ex. Maybe this would make a good test for figuring out if your current s/o has any hangups related to an ex of their own…? 🤔