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Over the past few months I've realised how important it is, for my own emotional well-being, to just take things as they come, to not worry about why things have or haven't happened, or if they will happen at all. In my own experience, rumination upon such topics never achieves or changes anything.
Using benchmarks, timelines and comparisons to past relationships seems thoroughly unnecessary at the best of times and counterproductive at the worst. It's a potential source of stress or anxiety of things don't seem to be moving in a way in which you are familiar with (note: this is not necessarily a bad thing). It can make you try and fit square pegs into round holes. You can end up missing out on opportunities or alternative paths. In fact, I'm struggling to see any positive reasons for making such comparisons at all.
I also have a certain belief in the self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to these things. To use your example, if someone has a string of relationships with different people that have ended at the two and a half year mark, it's probably not coincidental and is fact down to some sort of behaviour or attitude as opposed to the time itself, and it's likely to be something that one or both people in the relationship have control over. It's not the passage of time itself that causes the breakdown of the relationship, it's one or both partners, or some sort of external circumstance. As all of these things are different in every relationship, it seems fruitless to place any weight on such benchmarks when it comes to future experiences.
Having said that, I'm not a believer in the concept of the "foolish mistake" and therefore don't have any desire to be overly cautious as a result of previous relationships. I can honestly say that I have never regretted anything, even things that in relationships have caused me considerable distress. This is because I think all experiences are valuable as you can learn from them about yourself, other people or the world in general.
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