Love and Marriage

When I graduated from high school and ventured out into this big scary world, as emotionally immature as I was, a story that I had heard over the years made a huge impact on my life. It was a love story that was so special that one could not ignore it—and it was about my father’s parents and my beloved grandparents. They seemed to be so in tune with each other that it was almost impossible to think of them as individuals. It was never just grandpa or grandma with me; it was always my beloved grandparents. They were George and Gracie, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Anthony and Cleopatra. They were an inseparable team and when one of them died, it seemed like the end of the world for the other, and in their case, it was.

As life went on, and I took a partner, the example my grandparents had set out for me became my guideline, my instrument of thought when it came to building my marriage and my relationship with my wife. I had learned from them that that there was no “me” in a good marriage, just an inseparable “we.” That together, we could raise good children, build a loving home, and lay the blocks for their future lives with someone else as their life partner. But more than that, with or without children, we were the support team for each other. I had seen how fragile and incomplete I was alone, before marriage, and knew now—after marriage—that she was completing me with all of the missing pieces that go into a successful union and family.

As different as a woman and a man are anatomically,  they are also that different emotionally. But when you blend the best of both of them, you come out with a homogenized team that is the finer of two worlds. Love and respect for each other is the cornerstone and centerpiece of all of this. From love and respect, come all of the pieces that let you make it big in marriage. Pieces like problem solving, and sharing all of life’s ups and downs. You are there to laugh together, to cry together, to love together, to take care of each other, and to die together. You get to know each other as well as you know yourself. You have, in effect, melted two hearts and two bodies into one.

The only downside to all of this is—you can’t always go out together.  Then, this wonderful union is ripped in half, and you are lost in this frightening world once again. Your heart will look like a lovely porcelain vase that was dropped and glued back together. It will still hold water, but the scars from the breakage will always show. You may find love again someday, or what you perceive as love, but in the long run, if you felt like my grandparents felt about each other, and my wife and I feel about each other, it would be so difficult to ever get back to where you were. You see, it takes a lot to erase what you felt and experienced for all those years, and to be truthful, you might not want to even try. You and she or he set the bar a long time ago, and it just isn’t fair to anyone else. 

The words that describe the perfect marriage describe something that cannot be truthfully claimed by anyone—because what is the criteria? What is the measure? I know that only when you lose half of the team, will you finally realize how close you came.