What would you do?

Say, at the beginning of a relationship, you knew the following:

• it is going to be one of the most wonderful things you'll ever have in your life
• it is going to be one of the most agonizingly painful things you'll ever have in your life.

I'm not talking about the normal highs and lows of a relationship--I'm talking really intense experiences, where the highs are stratospheric and the lows are correspondingly deep, if not deeper.

Would you still get into it?

That's sort of the question one of my characters in my current project is facing, and I've always found it intriguing. I know what I would do--I'd go into it anyway. Every relationship is like that, I know--there's good and there's bad.

But what I'm talking about is a little bit more than the typical things people go through--I'm talking about enormously powerful entities, and, in the end, one person will be forced to destroy the other. My character knows this, going in, though that will be years down the road. She decides to proceed with it anyway.

Does she regret it? Yes and no. That's sort of what the book is about. Because of this relationship, and my character's decision to go through with it, terrible things happen to a lot of people. But there is also a friendship, a mutual affection, a love that develops, too, and these two characters share a lot of wonderful and fantasic experiences together. A strong bond develops between them, in spite of the differences that erupt and the conflict that ensues.

I will tell you my character does not regret going through with it, making the decision she makes regarding this other character, in spite of it all, in spite of all that it costs her, in the end. She wouldn't change anything about it.

And I agree with that, and I would have made the same decision that she makes.

But what would you do?