Love and Marriage

This blog is inspired by an on ongoing conversation between my friend, Jessica, and I that will probably span the decades if it has not already.

The subject is marriage and people that have known me for a long or even short amount of time know how I once felt about marriage. I never dreamed of it and I never saw the point. I'm not religious, so I felt no pull to have my relationship recognized in a church and if you aren't religious, well what's the point of getting married? Tax purposes?

I'm sure this sounds very cynical and skeptical and not very romantic at all, but it's just how I felt. I knew you basically signed an official document, had a ceremony, maybe a reception and a honeymoon and then spent your life honoring and adoring each other. It didn't sound so bad and I definitely understood why people wanted to do it, but it still wasn't for me.

I believed then and still believe now that people change. I think we can all agree on that. So (and this is the conclusion I came to during one of my "conversations" with Jessica) I never wanted my relationship with Josh to come to a point where we'd both changed so much that we didn't want to be together, but we had no choice because we'd signed that paper. I truly, wholeheartedly, want Josh to pack up his things and leave me if a day comes that he does not love me anymore. The thought of either of us sticking around together simply because we committed forever to each other at one point is just heartbreaking. The dissolution of an unhappy marriage is so much less a vulgar idea to me than two people staying in a loveless marriage. Don't get me wrong. We've been together for a long time and have experienced the lowest of lows and the highest of highs, but even in the darkest times love still remained.

All this being said...

I now wear an engagement ring AND a wedding ring on my left hand. Well, not right now at this exact moment, because I was just doing the dishes, but you get the point. I have a marriage license in my filing cabinet drawer in a folder labeled "important documents". My last name is the same as my husband's last name. I'm married.

I had an epiphany one day, shortly before I announced to Josh that I would indeed marry him. Yes, we may change. We WILL change. That is inevitable. We will encounter highs and lows. Happiness and maybe some devastation. At some point, one or both of us may fall out of the love that we've enjoyed and nurtured over the past seven years. But we're in love now at this exact moment and at the moment that we committed our lives to each other, forever didn't feel like long enough. That's what it's all about to me. I don't know what the future holds for any of us, but I know what the past held and what the present feels like, and that's enough for me.

Marriage, like Motherhood, is something I just never knew I wanted. It's something I have embraced. Embracing these changes in my opinions and views is turning me into a more accepting and less judgmental version of my former self. It excites me to think of how much more I'm going to grow in the future.