Day 23~Love & Marriage

PSA:  Before I delve into this challenge, there will be some excerpts from Missing the Old.  It was a blog I originally was not going to post, but I discovered someone was not being straight up, so I apologize in advance if there is a little bit of repetition....

23~ Do you think love and marriage are synonymous?


No, they aren’t.

I have never been married, but what one of my married friends is going through is living proof that the two aren’t synonymous at all.

I will have to share part of the story because 1. It is a good example and 2. I feel like I’m in the marriage and at the point where I’m like “I don’t want to hear any more about it.”.

I will call my friend Lost (because a lot of us feel as if he’s lost his marbles). 

Lost and I go back since the mid 90’s. He and I were always there for each other, had terrific conversation, the whole nine.   He and I lost a little bit of touch after I graduated from high school and went on to college. I didn’t really come back home much, even though home was a little over an hour away from campus. By the time he and I got back to really talking, I was making plans to move to GA, and Lost was preparing to marry his first wife. I didn’t know much about her but he seemed to be quite happy. I wished him all the best.

I didn’t live in GA for too long; I’m not going to recap the story of how I ended up in NJ because I already covered it (click on the link)

So fast forward to when I got a chance to come to MS in 2005. Lost told me he was getting a divorce. He was pretty steadfast in his decision to be done with her. However, I could tell that some of the old Lost was disappearing. He didn’t do a lot of the stuff that used to give him pleasure anymore, but I figured that the breakup would give him a chance to get himself back to normal.

I thought Lost would see it as a chance to get refocused on his aspirations--to rediscover what made him the man that he was. I thought he had a better chance of that without getting in a new relationship right away.

Whatever was left of my OLD FRIEND was obliterated when he met his second wife.
Her energy was bad to begin with; foundation shaky at best. Lost’s stuff wasn’t quite finalized, neither was hers. She had issues with faithfulness from the beginning, before Lost decided to marry her.

When I saw Lost in 2008, he told me about the trauma he had already gone through with her. The OLD LOST would have already told her to kick rocks; or at least hold off on any further commitment until she could really prove she could be faithful. But this NEW LOSTseemed tormented; he knew he was being disrespected and yet, he saw it as something that could be worked through.

Whatever this was; I didn’t like it. I told him she wasn’t the right one for him, to not marry her.

But he did it anyway.

Love, honor, and cherish went right out the window.

If you love, honor, and cherish someone, you don’t let anyone else love, honor, and cherish your body besides your husband. No matter what you’re going through, sex with someone else isn’t the answer. If it gets to the point where you are going to cheat, break up with him; leave him be.

For better or worse flew out the door, too.

You don’t choose when a person is at his worse to insult his pride and throw him out.

None of that looks like Love to me; damn sure doesn't look like good marriage material.

If love and marriage were synonymous, this is an example of the type of marriage I definitely would not want. I do not want to say Lost’s experiences have turned me off from marriage altogether; however, it does put me a little on pause.

If Love is in the relationship, will it get rocked more by marriage than enhanced? From what I’ve seen, some of my friends were ten times happier when they were not seeing anyone or just in the dating stages.

I know of people who were living together ten years but the moment the nuptials were read, they couldn’t stay together for two…I still find that a bit baffling.

No, they are not synonymous, but if I do walk down the aisle, I definitely need them to be synonymous for me.