One of this week’s biggest stories in the celebrity world was the engagement news of Adam Levine, frontman of Maroon 5 (and serial modelizer), to Behati Prinsloo, a Namibian Vicoria’s Secret Model. After dating briefly before a split last year, the pair apparently reunited in Los Angeles last weekend – and he proposed! I know.
My first thought was also that I had yogurt in my fridge sporting an expiry date further off than this ill-fated union’s. I scrolled through the comments below the article and silently nodded in approval at the: “She MUST be pregnant’”….”He loves himself too much for this to ever work!”…”Their age difference is insane!”…etc. But then I started amusing myself with the even more ridiculous notion that maybe they really had worked out their issues and have a long and healthy partnership in their future. This would be boring and all sorts of anticlimactic for the gossipy middle school girl in all of us, but exes reunite all the time in real life and make it work – don’t they?
Below are 3 questions I can only hope Adam and Behati asked themselves before getting back together, and you probably should too before reuniting with an ex:
1) Why are we reuniting?
Because you’re the lead singer of a famous band, and she’s a world-class model/possessor of other-worldly beauty? No. Because you are starting to feel pressure to get married sooner rather than later, are scared of ending up alone, and or want to prove to yourself that you can win the other person back? Also No. When asking yourself this question, your ego is not your amigo. If your answer is more in line with your own health and happiness, you are on the right track. If you can see a future with this person, genuinely love each other, and make each other better humans…ask yourself this next question:
2) Why did we break up?
Maybe you stopped putting each other first, or spent too much time apart, or his little quirks that you loved at first completely lost their appeal. For the most part it doesn’t really matter why you parted ways. If you had a relatively healthy break up that you may be able to come back from, that’s one thing. But if you are dealing with trust issues, commitment phobia, any type of abuse, or something that will always live in the back of your head and possibly haunt your relationship forever, you need to be honest with yourself. You should consider a conversation with this person and decide what the issues were that drove you apart, and if you can live with them in the future. Will he change? What if he hasn’t, or won’t? How have you changed? Was the original decision to break up the right one? Real talk.
3) Can I live with my decision?
This means despite knowing that your mother is not down with him, and dealing with inevitable eye rolls from your friends, you remain at peace with your choice to move forward together. It means that you will accept any fallout and embrace the sacrifices you will inevitably have to make because you’re confident in your decision being the right one for you at this time. It means reminding yourself that it’s not always rainbows and butterflies, its compromise that moves us along…
So good luck to those of you who are struggling with this dilemma. And good luck to me in posting this article before the couple mentioned above breaks up, deeming this whole thing irrelevant.
