Love and Marriage

I feel very cliche talking about this subject, it has been talked about, sung about, thought about, rhymed about, written about millions of times over, sometimes by the same people. Yet here I am, talking about the inevitable L word… Love.

I also feel the need to preference this by stating that I am a romantic at heart. I have always fully believed in love, true love. And not even really the suicidal kind like Shakespeare tended to like to write about really. I just believed that there would be this person in which I would eventually fall head over heels for. Love thoroughly, love their quirks, their misgivings, every little bit about them. I have no pretense that I would never be annoyed or that there would never be problems, but never a doubt in mind that someone existed out there specifically for me and only me.

I believe in this concept of love so deeply that I do not let a lot of things trip me up the way that it trips other people up. Different race? Who cares. Distance, whatever. Been with someone else for years? Well who am I to say that they haven’t been searching themselves and felt alone and needed someone while they found me. Nothing really bothers me on this endless search because in the end love will win out.

Right. I don’t know if that is true anymore though. I look at marriages in particular and very few of them seem to be about love. Lust is very common, I know a number of people who have little in common and are terrible for each other but find each other really attractive so they just put real issues aside and have sex all of the time.

However, I honestly feel the biggest reason for marriage, in this country at least, is the concept of settling. People feel they NEED to be married, especially by a certain age (I’d say 25 or 26). So instead of waiting to find someone they actually love, they tend to find someone who is good enough. I know a number that fall into this category.

I think what makes this worse is the concept of “my wife is my best friend” which means to say that at one point your wife was just your friend and you married that friend. Best friends often develop because you just are around your friend for a long time, longer than others. Marriage thusly becomes an easy way to lock into friends, except they must be an opposite gender in order to lock in this friend. Furthermore, once married, most say it isn’t healthy to then hang out and be friends with someone else of the opposite gender or risk finding someone who is more friendly, or even worse, someone you actually love. This creates a situation where if you find a friend of an opposite sex, you are more likely to settle for that person and marry them due to outside pressure.

Once in a marriage, I do feel a good number of people realize that maybe they picked the wrong person, maybe they married too soon, whatever and they also kind of realize in there that they aren’t really in love. The problem is that many of these people will then stay in their marriage for a multitude of reasons… they don’t want to admit a mistake, they don’t believe in divorce, they are scared to be alone,  they are scared of what the other will do if they try to leave, or all of the above.

Yay for marriage.

I have seen very few instances of true love. VERY FEW. I can think of one example of which that comes very close but even that has a weird dichotomy where the guy thinks he has found someone who is far better than anything else he could get and lets her walk all over him to the point that he isn’t the same person. This isn’t really love, this actually closer falls into the lust category, but is actually very similar to love because if that aspect of it weren’t there, I actually would believe they were fully in love (everything else about the relationship is just right).

The problem I foresee with all of this is one of common interest. We live in a country that values marriage (even though it usually never works). But we also don’t value those things that would make for a better marriage…. you know what would make for a better marriage? Love. However, when people feel pressured into marrying at a young age and “settling” and then look down upon splitting up with others for love, we end up with a society in which we like the idea of marriage, but just don’t want people to have good marriages over all. We’d rather they rush into it and then be locked into it regardless of anything else.

For those actually looking for love, like myself, it lowers the choices. The question then becomes… in today’s society. Is it more honorable to be unmarried because that means  you are still searching for the right person and not just settling at mediocre? We are supposed to be mediocre country after all, we strive for the best. Shouldn’t we strive for the best marriage too? We don’t, and we don’t think that it is honorable if someone does save his soul for his true mate. But maybe we should.

For me personally, I am losing grasp on love. I don’t particularly think it exists anymore. There is always something isn’t there. The irony though is that I don’t particularly want to settle still. I’d rather not be in the unhappy marriage just for the sake of having it. I guess I always was a little different.