Relationships are hard. Anyone who ever tells you otherwise either has not been in a relationship recently or they are not the one putting in the effort in the relationship. It can be easy to coast in a relationship where someone else is putting in all the effort and not demanding anything of you. At least it can be easy for the person coasting. For the other person things are getting harder and harder, especially if the first person chooses to see every little thing as expected and gets annoyed if the other person’s efforts aren’t constantly upped.
This goes for any sort of relationship, a romantic one, a friendship, family. It even works in enmity, although in that one, you probably want the other person to quit making the effort.
I didn’t actually dig that deep with this one. I just picked a common phrase and played with dialogue involving it. Dialogue is a lot of fun for me. I see the characters in my head better when they are speaking than when they are being described in great detail, so dialogue is always interesting to write.
With this particular prompt, the idea was more about expectations, specifically the expectations of the first speaker, than anything else. The first person starts to say something and for some reason the second person doesn’t let them finish. It’s not actually stated that the second person finished correctly. When you read dialogue, unless it’s stated or implied in someway, you really don’t know if what follows is correct or not, so it’s entirely possible that the subject was going to be something else. That’s for you to decide.
As the author of this prompt, I have ideas in my head of what might be going on here. Maybe the second person really does like her. Maybe this is a common conversation and the first person is just messing with the second person to tease about a crush. That’s not what I see. I actually see a spy, maybe two on opposing sides and the second speaker has just been caught by his friend which is going to cause some problems. How about you? What do you see when you look at this conversation? Who are these people in your head?
