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Tending the homefires
Take Charlene Petrie who compiles music for film soundtracks. 'It's not a great idea to spend too much time inside your partner's head,' she says. 'Sometimes my boyfriend will be quiet, and I'll be convinced it's about us or me or something I did. I'll walk around for a few hours convinced that something's wrong. Then I'll finally ask and it will turn out to be some work-related issue that's making him moody. That sort of guesswork can be really unproductive.'
Charlene is one of those women who's always in a long-term relationship. In fact they've been so long that, at 30, she's only had time for two. When she met her boyfriend Andrew on a blind date, she had just got out of a ten-year relationship that started when she was 16. Andrew had never dated anyone for longer than a year.
'After a few dates,' she recalls, 'our relationship took off like wildfire - well, a quiet wildfire. But we didn't move in together until we'd been together for more than a year. Sure, there are exceptions, but I think that nothing can kill a love affair quicker than moving in too soon.'
'There are a lot of stages that you go through in the first year of a relationship - at three months, at six months, at 12 months,' Alperen says. 'Changes happen that you can't always anticipate in the first bloom of romance. It's best to be patient. Slow and steady wins the race.'
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