And i think that this bears mentioning before we get to the fifth and final which is the relationship escalator is privileged, and it may whisk you along, but it doesn't mean it's easy.

Yes, it doesn't mean it's easy. And like any big choice or set of choices in your life that involve other real people. It

has trade offs, and its subject to change or desruption, indeed. Yes. Ok. Number five, continuity and consistency. Correct? Yes. Yes. At

least a's a gol. If you don't mind, i'd like to read a little something from my book here, because this explain it better than anything i could do off the cuff. I linke it. So the norm of continuity and consistency, or at least having a goal that is, because the escalator is supposed to be a one way trip. They are not supposed to pause or step back to a less merged or less continuous state. Also, escalators ir supposed to have defined, permanent roles. For instance, intimate partners aren't supposed to shift between being lovers and platonic friends, ok? But actually, this does often happen in long, termed, traditional relationships, but usually it's not acknowledged. And of course, the relationship is supposed to last forever, until death do you part. Death is the only way to end an escalato relationship that isn't automatically branded failure. Ok. So despite that, the reality is that most relationships, including relationships on the escalator, are fluid they change because people change over time. But the thing is adhering to escalator norms and not talking about how you don't adhere to them, or not overtly acknowledging the changes that do occur overtime, like a, maybe you don't actually have sex with your spouse any more. Those are things that people don't necessarily talk about. But the thing is important. Relationships do shift and change ever the time, whether they're on the escalator or not. And they aren't always continuous. In fact, that can be a feature, not a bug. There are some relationships that are kind of like comets, you know, they periodically swing through your life, and then they're out of er. This is something that is very common in friendships. You probably have that wit, those friends who you don't talk to for a couple of years, and ten you boom, you're on the phone for six hours, and the you go visit them maybe once a year or so, and then you are out of contact for a while. Well, thatcan happen in relationships that also include the kind of emotional intensity that is considered romance. It can happen with relationships that include sex. It can come and go. You know, another way that relationships might not necessarily be continuous, is that they might be agreeably finite. For instance, that person that you always huck up with a burning nat or somebody that o relationship you know that you are both eventually going to leave college and move on, or that only lasts as long as you are both involved in a particular community. It might be a community of iterest or something like that. But there's some constraint that says, this relationship works in this context, and we are not going to attempt to extend it beyond that. That doesn't mean it's a failure. Sometimes people wrote in their survey for my book about some of these relationships that were change their life. There re some of the most important and valuable and valid relationships that they ever had, but by escalador metric, they either didn't count or were failures. We're bropry somehow.