My boyfriend brings me a rose from his garden almost every time we get together. Sometimes when we’re out, he absentmindedly reaches for his pocket flashlight — he’s used to running out to his garden in the darkness, grabbing a bloom before he sees me.

Sweet. It’s sweet, what we have. It’s also complicated, frustrating, rewarding, and confusing, just to name a few. Relationships are like that, are they not? It’s a universal agreement that most no one really likes to think about. It sure would be easier if we all believed the hype and all found our one mate, perfectly fitting like lock and key.

My friend Jeanie and I came up with a model that helps me visualize a two-person romantic relationship. It’s too complicated to describe here but it has to do with two orbits, happy/sad cycles, and the dense mathematics that allow the rare time that everything meets perfectly in the middle.

This idea helps me to hang on when the orbit paths are way out of whack; I just need to be patient and trust, with cheerful optimism, that we will circle back towards each other.