an article about marriage

i remember reading this article a long time before
and until now, it still is a great read.
hope you all enjoy reading it as much as i did. =)

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 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 other's
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 the 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 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 other's 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
doesn't 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
see 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 tome to question the dark miracle that
transformed love into harshness and bitterness. Yet I
was unable to accept the possibility that the first
heat of love could be transformed into something
positive that was actually deeper and more meaningful
than the heat of fresh passion. All I could believe in
was the power of this passion and the fear that when
it cooled I would be left with something lesser and
bitter.

But there is positive transformation as well. Like
negative transformation, it results from a slow
accretion of little things. But instead of death by a
thousand blows, it is growth by a thousand touches of
love. Two histories intermingle. Two separate beings,
two separate presence, two separate consciousnesses
come together and share a view of life that passes
before them. They remain separate, but they also
become one. There is an expansion of awareness, not a
closure and a constriction, as I had once feared. This
is not to say that there is not tension and there are
not traps.

Tension and traps are part of every choice of life,
from celibate to monogamous to having multiple lovers.
Each choice contains within it the lingering doubt
that the road not taken somehow more fruitful and
exciting, and each becomes dulled to the richness that
it alone contains.

But only marriage allows life to deepen and expand and
be leavened by the knowledge that two have chosen,
against all odds, to become one. Those who live
together without marriage can know the pleasure of
shared company, but there is a specific gravity in the
marriage commitment that deepens that experience into
something richer and more complex.

So do not fear marriage, just as you should not rush
into it for the wrong reasons. It is an act of faith
and it contains within it the power of transformation.
If you believe in your heart that you have found
someone with whom you are able to grow, if you have
sufficient faith that you can resist the endless
attraction of the road not taken and the partner not
chosen, if you have the strength of heart to embrace
the cycles and seasons that your love will experience,
then you may be ready to seek the miracle that
marriage offers. If not, then wait. The easy grace of
a marriage well made is worth your patience. When the
time comes, a thousand flowers will bloom...endlessly.

-----------------------------------------------------------
A beautiful piece. Pls pass it on specially to the
young people who are starting to get into relationships
or are in a relationship.
It would save them a lot of heartaches and bitterness
down the road.

"Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect.
It means you've decided to see life beyond the
imperfections. So, don't say you're happy because
everything is alright. Be happy because everything
sucks but you're just fine ..." -BeRNaRd,,