The Problem With Marriage
I have a friend he got married a year ago. I went to his bachelor party in Amsterdam. I gave the best man speech at his wedding. And now a year later, she’s moved out. They don’t get along. They both hate each other. They’re getting a divorce.
It’s not a surprise. I saw it coming. Everyone saw it coming. They didn’t see it coming.
They fought all the time. Went to couples therapy for a year before they were married. They swore things were going to be different. The marriage was going to save their relationship. It didn’t. It got worse. Because marriage isn’t a solution to a problem.
But that’s the problem with relationships. You can’t see what’s obvious to other people. You don’t want to listen to what other people have to say. You justify your relationship by proclaiming that no one else can know how you feel, why you love, or what you need. So you believe the lies you tell yourself, find solutions that don’t make sense, and you continue on because in your mind there is no eject button.
Which is why I feel bad for my friend. I know he tried to make it work. I know he’s in pain. I know he’s lost.
But I am here for him, always.
In regards to today’s observation… I can’t stop wondering why we all try so hard to make relationships work. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Maybe it’s simply the fact that we don’t love ourselves enough. When we meet an attractive person who makes us feel great about ourselves we call that love! When that person stops making us feel great about ourselves we call that falling out of love. Our first taste of love comes from our parents and let’s face it, they generally fuck it up. We are sent out into the world with an impoverished sense of self and spend the rest of our lives looking for an ideal mommy or daddy in the form of a hot guy or girl. We give the reins of our esteem to said hot guy or girl and mistakenly believe that their validation equals love. We will do anything to hold on to that feeling because down deep we don’t believe that we can achieve it on our own. We refuse to see an eject button because we understand that once we catapult ourselves from the relationship we are back to searching for love. What if we all took responsibility for our own happiness and stopped needing others to love us. We would then be free to love unconditionally - not seeking a relationship to get something but rather to give something. Genuine love is so powerful because it expects nothing in return.
With that said….. few of us are Mother Teresa, nor do we want to be. It feels great to be loved and for that matter, validated as well. Sometimes we all need to believe the lies that we tell ourselves (or the ones that others tell us). Being solely responsible for my own happiness gets pretty stinkin’ boring. Self love, I’m pretty sure, is an awesome thing to attain but it just might take a life time to achieve.
In the mean time, I’ll just go ahead and believe that the hot guy really loves me