You keep hurting each other because, frankly, neither of you know what the hell you are doing. That's the other half of love that no one ever tells you about. Oh sure it feels great, makes you happy, all that mushy jazz, but right beside that is all the stupidity and fear. The good news is that you are definitely in love. I mean the real love. Not the story book bullshit you're read/hear about or seen in movies that some asshole dreamed up because he knew it would make an easy buck. No no no, real love is all the good stuff that you look forward to wrapped up in the dripping smelly rag that we call "drama" and that everyone swears on their profile pages they don't want or can't stand. "No drama please. I don't go for it. If you are into drama just keep on walking" pfft, yea right. This is reality and you have to face up to it. You can't have the good without the bad, and sure you've heard that before but what's worse is that the bad will always overwhelm the good in life. Because nobody is perfect sure, but the reality that I already mentioned you have to face is that no one even comes close to being perfect. We all suck. So there's going to be a lot of people that tell you the same thing. You have to work at it if you want it to be a happy healthy relationship. Sure, that's good advice from a logical place, but love isn't logical, and you know that by now. So the only advice I can actually give you is to stop looking at your relationship (or any other relationship for that matter) like some kind of house or creative pet project of some kind. Yea yea, strong foundation, plenty of room to grow, blah blah blah. That never works. If you can compare a relationship to anything it can only be compared to a person, and like I said, we all suck. What do people do when someone they know does something or many things that they don't like? They either nag, bitch, poke, and prod until that person changes (which never actually happens. No one changes something about themselves that they don't want to change in the first place. Except the relationship itself); they learn to live with it and continue to enjoy all the things they like about that person while accepting the things they don't like (best case scenario there); or they move on. Oh, there is the forth option, ignore it until it goes away/fixes itself. So that's it. Those are really your only options. If I were you i'd start asking myself, "can I learn to live with the things I don't like about this relationship?" and if the answer is anything other than "yes" well, crap. Go with number four I guess. But anyway, my only real point is this. You have to consider all the things you have and all the things you'd be going without should things change. Because there's no story book love out there, and at the same time most people will never be lucky enough to touch on the deep emotional love that you are experiencing in your life right now. You have so much to lose and so little to gain otherwise from where I stand. But what the hell do I know? I'm just a guy that read your blog post...