Some background: She is divorced with a 4-year-old. She definitely married the wrong man. Her extended family is littered with dysfunctional relationships and bad marriages. I have been married for 5 years with no children. We have gone through marriage counseling and really struggled for a couple years. My extended family is full of long-lasting seemingly happy marriages and families.
She believes in The One and that you have no control over falling in love with them and loving them forever even if they are not good for you. I do not believe there is The One. I think our lives could take a million different paths depending on the choices we make. One different decision on my part and I could be happily (or miserably) married to someone totally different. She believes in the fairy-tale-romance kind of love. She wants to be swept off her feet and have romantic-comedy-worthy moments everyday. She thinks love means less issues, less disagreements. I believe that love is something you choose to maintain everyday and that marriage is hard work. I believe that the choice to get married cannot be taken lightly and that people are too quick to jump to divorce when things get tough. I think the movies/tv/books that I love so much paint an unrealistic picture of what love and marriage truly is.
This really only scratches the surface and I know how lucky I have been in the choices I have made. I am not shy in saying that my decision to get married was not well thought out and was one of the riskiest things I have ever done. I am lucky that we have made it through 5 years. I also know we've worked at it.
That's my two-cents. What's yours?
2 comments:
I 100% agree with you. Love is not like the movies or something out of a Nicholas Sparks book. Love is hard. Marriage is hard. Sean and I have had more than our share of difficulties and there have been many times where I seriously just wanted to throw in the towel and be done with it. I think your friend is in denial. I'm not saying there are people out there that are better for you than others, because I think there are, but there are a TON of people you'd be compatible and probably have a happy marriage with, not just one person. I think the sooner she gets real, the better off she'll be.
I used to think that love was easy. I used to think that marriage was easy and that it shouldn't be hard work... if you were meant to be together, it would be easy.
WRONG.
Well, I was right for about the first 2 years of our marriage until my husband deployed to Iraq for over a year. He came back a different person. I was different too. We both grew and changed over that period and had to re-learn how to be married. It was tough, extremely tough.
It all comes down to commitment, I think. Marriage takes work and it's not easy. Anything that's worthwhile isn't easy.
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