Ponderings...

One of my closest, dearest friends is divorced.  I was maid of honor in her wedding in 1999.  I remember when she and her now-ex-husband were just starting to date.  He was the youth pastor and she was a senior in high school when she started liking him.  But it was super frowned upon so nothing happened until after she graduated.  They told each other how they felt over IM.  HA!  I happened to be spending the night at her house on that fateful night so she woke me up at 2am to tell me "he feels the same way".  I remember having no blessed clue what she was talking about until she said she was still IM-ing her guy.  And so they dated and eventually got married.  Then got divorced.  

It occurred to me recently that marriage is such a gamble.  You are trusting this other person with your life, not to mention your heart.  At the beginning of every relationship, there are all these feelings.  Love, lust, attraction, admiration...the list goes on.  Then reality starts to set in.  What used to be cute and endearing is now annoying as hell.  Working late used to show dedication to a job.  Now it's just a way to avoid going home.  You add kids to the mix and all sorts of new problems show up.  

So what makes a marriage last?  

I used to think that I had the best marriage in the world.  Most days I still think that.  But there are days...days I think there's no way in the world I can live with this man for one more second.  Days I think I'd be better off alone.  I'm not a perfect person.  I will never claim to be one.  I don't know of any perfect people in this world.  So for 2 imperfect people to come together and live in harmony?  Hard to believe.  There are going to be conflicts.  There are going to be days when one or both of you want to throw in the towel.  There will even be days when one or both of you throw down the gauntlet and say "enough!!"  I've had those days.  It wasn't long ago that my husband and I were considering divorce.  Neither of us were happy.  We had slipped into complacency and accepted that things would never change.  Finally one day, I said I was done.  I couldn't live like that anymore.  I cried, I yelled, I cried some more.  How could my life have taken such a drastic turn?  On our wedding day I loved my husband with such a fierceness I never thought we'd grow apart.  But that's exactly what happened.  There was no abuse, there was no affair, just simply...stoic indifference.  I looked at this man who I had loved with every fiber of my being and I saw a stranger.  He looked at me and saw the same.  We had become two completely different people living two separate lives.  So what to do?  The easy answer would be to throw in the towel.  For some, that's the only answer.   

We weren't ready to make that break.  For all our faults, we knew that love was the basis of our relationship.  We had to work...we had to work hard to make it back from the brink.  But we did.  Our marriage is stronger now than they day we were married.  There are still hard days.  We fight, we get angry.  But we don't allow ourselves to become indifferent.  

I wish in our pre-marital counseling, our pastor would have said "you will want to end this marriage at some point".  Of course no engaged couple wants to hear that!  Still, it'd be nice to hear that we're normal.  But we fought for us.  We made a commitment and we stuck to it.  

I don't know why this was on my mind today.  It just was.  Maybe I need to cut back on the sugar...