I went to see a magician last night, The Amazing Kozac! It encouraged me to make this post. Let's begin with an introduction.

Yes, The Amazing Crisco is appearing tonight. From near and far, the town folks gathered to see his performance.

There is much in common between The Amazing Crisco and your new love interest. The analogy is quite strong, but most people never make the association. So consider yourself lucky to learn about it here.

If you know anything about magic, and even if you don’t, you must have seen how one or another magic tricks work. Once you learned the “secret” you pretty much ruined the illusion for yourself and came to the realization that it wasn’t such a big deal. It was sort of like when you found out there is no Tooth Fairy and that Santa was not real either.

There are reasons that all the great magicians have a code of honor to never reveal their tricks. It's because they know, well, that once you know the trick, the magic is gone.

Now, let’s try to relate this simple, easy too understand concept to love and relationships.

When you first meet someone with whom you find that special thing we call chemistry, part of the “magic” is that you don’t really know them very well and they are a mystery. They are sort of like the metaphorical magic trick, not to be confused with the “trick” you picked up in the bar the other night.

The element of mystery makes new love interests desirable because all you see are the things that you like... the chemical stuff. Once you get to know them, you see all sorts of things from “behind the curtain.” Notice we continue with the metaphors, in this case taken from The Wizzard of Oz.

The things you learn about this person are often mundane and even border on not so great. Let’s face it, if you met someone and they kept picking their nose and passing wind, you wouldn’t give them another thought. That's why it takes time for your mate to feel comfortable enough to let it all hang out, and when they do, the magic is gone.

The point of this treatise is to better understand why relationships are so much more difficult as they move forward allowing the magic to disappear.

In order to maintain "the fire" the "passion" we all have to work hard to not show all of our magical secrets, like picking our nose and passing wind, something all men learn from their fathers. There are so many behaviors that are repulsive and yet we seem to think that just because someone makes a commitment to us, we can show them all these tricks (tricks here being a euphanism for disgusting behavior).

You have to take stock in yourself and try to think of all your “tricks.” Let’s list a few. For the guys, we already mentioned two. Other tricks include not listening to our mates when they need to vent, leaving our dirty clothing laying around, missing the bowl and never noticing, leaving hairs in the shower that could easily be washed away if you just kept your magnifying glass with you in the shower, turning over to go to sleep within two minutes of your orgasm with little or no cuddle time, forgetting birthdays and other assorted moments like the anniversary of the day you met, and an especially good trick we seem to have acquired genetically because it is so universal and that is leaving the toilet seat lid in the up position. I could go on and on for the guys, but you get the point.

The women have an equally good bunch of tricks up their sleeve as well. They might try to hide the yelling and screaming over every little thing, crying for no apparent reason, hounding us with long stories of gossip and true bullshit the moment we get home, spending hours to put on makeup and do your hair, and having a need to shop whereby you spend more than some small third world country's gross national product. Again, I could go on and on, but you do get the idea.

Part of the inspiration for this posting has much to do with thoughts that dating is “fun” and more involved relationships tend to degenerate into “not so much fun.” You see, when we are in the dating stage, the honeymoon phase, the early period of any relationship, we don’t show our lovers how we do our tricks. They only see us in the light of pure amazing grace. They feel the magic, and oh how good it feels.

It takes a lot of work to keep the magic alive. If you don’t think you can do it, maybe you’d be better off keeping a little distance and retaining a great dating relationship rather than entering into a marriage that may end up like around half of them currently do.