Hello fellow VJ'S .

I found this great piece circulated online and emailed to me by one my fried.. this piece opened up my mind about marriage...

I would like to say THANK YOU VERY MUCH for this wonderful masterpiece..

This is quite long but worth reading..


PARTNERS and MARRIAGE BY Eduardo Jose E. Calasanz

I have never met a man who didn't want to be loved.
But I have seldom met a man who didn't fear
marriage.
Something about the closure seems constricting, not
enabling. Marriage seems easier to understand for
what it cuts out of our lives than for what it makes
possible within our lives.

When I was younger this fear immobilized me. I did
not want to make a mistake.I saw my friends get married
for reasons of social acceptability, or sexual
fever, or just because they thought it was the logical
thing to do. Then I watched, as they and their partners
became embittered and petty in their dealings with
each other. I looked at older couples and saw, at
best, mutual toleration of each other. I imagined a
lifetime of loveless nights and bickering days and
could not imagine subjecting myself or someone else
to such a fate.

And yet, on rare occasions, I would see old couples
who somehow seemed to glow in each other's presence.
They seemed really in love, not just dependent upon
each other and tolerant of each other's foibles. It
was an astounding sight, and it seemed impossible.
How, I asked myself, can they have survived so many
years of sameness, so much irritation at the others
habits? What keeps love alive in them, when most of
us seem unable to even stay together, much less love
each other?

The central secret seems to be in choosing well.
There is something to the claim of fundamental
compatibility. Good people can create a bad
relationship, even though they both dearly want the
relationship to succeed. It is important to find
someone with whom you can create a good relationship
from t! he outset. Unfortunately, it is hard to see
clearly in the early stages.

Sexual hunger draws you to each other and colors the
way you see yourselves together. It blinds you to
the thousands of little things by which relationships
eventually survive or fail. You need to find a way
to see beyond this initial overwhelming sexual
fascination. Some people choose to involve
themselves sexually and ride out the most heated period of
sexual attraction in order to see what is on the other
side.

This can work, but it can also leave a trail of
wounded hearts. Others deny the sexual side
altogether in an attempt to get to know each other apart from
their sexuality. But they cannot see clearly,
because the presence of unfulfilled sexual desire looms so
large that it keeps them from having any normal
perception of what life would be like together.

The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to
become long-time friends before they realize they
are attracted to each other. They get to know each
other's laughs, passions, sadness, and fears. They see each
other at their worst and at their best. They share
time together before they get swept up into the
entangling intimacy of their sexuality.

This is the ideal, but not often possible. If you
fall under the spell of your sexual attraction
immediately, you need to look beyond it for other keys to
compatibility. One of these is laughter. Laughter
tells you how much you will enjoy each others
company over the long term.

If your laughter together is good and healthy, and
not at the expense of others, then you have a healthy
relationship to the world. Laughter is the child of
surprise. If you can make each other laugh, you can
always surprise each other. And if you can always
surprise each other, you can always keep the world
around you new.

Beware of a relationship in which there is no
laughter. Even the most intimate relationships based
only on seriousness have a tendency to turn sour.
Over time, sharing a common serious viewpoint on the
world tends to turn you against those who do not share the
same viewpoint, and your relationship can become
based on being critical together.

After laughter, look for a partner who deals with
the world in a way you respect. When two people first
get together, they tend to see their relationship as
existing only in the space between the two of them.
They find each other endlessly fascinating, and the
overwhelming power of the emotions they are sharing
obscures the outside world. As the relationship ages
and grows, the outside world becomes important
again.

If your partner treats people or circumstances in a
way you can't accept, you will inevitably come to
grief. Look at the way she cares for others
and deals with the daily affairs of life. If that
makes you love her more, your love will grow. If it
does not, be careful. If you do not respect the way
you each deal with the world around you, eventually
the two of you will not respect each other.

Look also at how your partner confronts the
mysteries of life. We live on the cusp of poetry and
practicality, and the real life of the heart resides
in the poetic. If one of you is deeply affected by
the mystery of the unseen in life and relationships,
while the other is drawn only to the literal and the
practical, you must take care that the distance does
not become an unbridgeable gap that leaves you each
feeling isolated and misunderstood.
There are many other keys, but you must find them by
yourself. We all have unchangeable parts of our
hearts that we will not betray and private commitments to a
vision of life that we will not deny. If you fall
in love with someone who cannot nourish those
inviolable parts of you, or if you cannot nourish them in her,
you will find yourselves growing further apart until
you live in separate worlds where you share the
business of life, but never touch each other where
the heart lives and dreams. From there it is only a
small leap to the cataloging of petty hurts and
daily failures that leaves so many couples bitter
and unsatisfied with their mates.

So choose carefully and well. If you do, you will
have chosen a partner with whom you can grow, and then
the real miracle of marriage can take place in your
hearts. I pick my words carefully when I speak of a
miracle. But I think it is not too strong a word.
There is a miracle in marriage. It is called
transformation. Transformation is one of the most
common events of nature. The seed becomes the
flower. The cocoon becomes the butterfly. Winter becomes
spring and love becomes a child. We never question
these, because we se! e them around us every day. To
us they are not miracles, though if we did not know
them they would be impossible to believe.


Marriage is a transformation we choose to make. Our
love is planted like a seed, and in time it begins
to flower. We cannot know the flower that will blossom,
but we can be sure that a bloom will come.

If you have chosen carefully and wisely, the bloom
will be good. If you have chosen poorly or for the
wrong reason, the bloom will be flawed.
We are quite willing to accept the reality of
negative transformation in a marriage. It was negative
transformation that always had me terrified
of the bitter marriages that I feared when I was
younger. It never occurred to me to question the
dark..

From my experience, a truly great relationship is one where the two people not only love each other but like each other as well. Where there is a genuine friendship/kinship between them. Where they can just enjoying being with each other, through good and bad times. That is something really rare.