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Marriage – Surrendering Ourselves Forever

Sometimes I feel I’ve been married forever and other times it seems as only a moment has passed since the “I do’s” were proclaimed.

marriage, divorce, commitment, falling in love, staying married, keep the spark alive, midlife, midlife women, featured

Maritza Martinez’s mother on her wedding day – 1964

First and foremost, I need to point out that I’m utterly in love with my husband, maybe much more than I was all those years ago. The truth is that I don’t know even why. It’s suppose to be the other way around, isn’t it?

Probably it is, because I haven’t seen much of a sparkle in any of the eyes of a lot of couples I know.  You know, the “infatuated” kind of sparkle, the one that shouts “I’ll die if you don’t have me” kind of thing.  Do you remember way back then (maybe 10, 15, 20 or more years ago) and how you felt?

Marriage brings out the best and worst in all of us. We want our husbands to know what and how we want things, and the most dangerous of them all, we expect them to know how we feel.  We create expectations that on many occasions are just too damn hard to live up to – and then we have to lie down in the bed we’ve made up for ourselves.

This is probably because at the beginning of our married lives we choose to see what we want and whisk away the things we don’t like.  As those same things catch up with us, we begin witnessing the flaws we didn’t want to work with in the beginning, making the initial sparkle fade away to an unwanted place of no return.

It’s not hard to understand that staying married is hard work now a days.  As our relationships have become more and more disposable, it’s easier to just let go and walk away.  It’s harder to work on our relationships.  We walk into this blissful state without really knowing what we’re getting into.  A philosophy professor I had once (who, by the way, was a Catholic priest) said that when we get married we surrender ourselves forever.  We no longer belong to ourselves, but entirely to another person.

We lose our freedom to the other person.

Is this true?

Do we become aware of this and just do an about-face and run?

The interesting part of my professor’s view was that marriage was a two person deal.  In other words, all our loss was his or her gain and vice versa.  Our significant other holds our freedom, but we at the same time hold his or hers.

This could work!

I have his happiness within my hands (a break it or make it kind of thing), but he also has mine.  We are two halves apart, yet joined in a perfect circle where the line between us is invisible.  Both become one, united in love, friendship, care, compassion, tenderness and passion.

Is it to hard to stay in love?

With the passing of time we forget all about the things that drew us together.  Many fall in lust and not in love.  Nevertheless, many have found love out of lust because they’ve been lucky enough to build their relationship from there on.

Relationships are all about finding our way around them.  There is no book, or rules, or anything in fact that can teach us how to make it work.   Funny coming from a person who buys a book for almost for everything I need to cope with. 

If you look back and can still see in that forsaken background the sparkle that united both of you together, reach out and fall in love all over again.

It’s more than worth it mis queridos amigos y amigas.

El amor siempre lo es………………..

 

Read more from Maritza Martinez on her blog, Believing

Maritza Martinez

I'm a stay at home English teacher, mother of four (one daughter and three boys) and have been happily married to my high school sweetheart for over twenty-seven years. I love to read, write and garden. I strive to always be learning new things, and to reflect on life with its ups and downs. Books have always been my best friends and helped me overcome a very difficult childhood. I owe this to a great teacher who taught me to love books and vegetables and inspired me to become a teacher. I struggle with a chronic illness (Myasthenia Gravis) everyday, but I don't let it take control of who I am. I take life at a slower pace and am enjoying every minute of it.

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