Some thoughts about marriage...

[Completely 3]

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..

Edited May 19, 2008 by Completely

[sarahaziz 0]

[warriorprincess 0]

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.