Expectations 101 Lesson #2: What they never told you while you were growing up

People have different reasons for entering relationships and marriages. Some marry for love, some for escape, some for sex, some for all these reasons. To make matters even more complicated, even the definitions of each of these terms vary from individual to individual. Love for instance. Ah, there's a term that will ignite more controversy than a lot of other less "subjective" words. What is love? To some, it's that rosy feeling you get immediately following a rousing session of blissful coitus. To others it's that dreary sense of commitment to a person or an ideal that, even though you don't know why you feel obliged to sell your heart and soul down the river to someone who doesn't return the favor, you still feel that it is your sworn duty to be there for them, no matter what, even at the expense of your own humanity(please forgive the run on sentence, this is stream of consciousness. Work with me, for crying out loud).

Someone very wise said a very wise thing to me today. He said "The answers to life's questions cannot be read in the pages of a book. If this were the case then any five year old could find them. Nor can someone tell you the answers because no two minds are identical". This came from the mind of a 22 year old, but it is so true it makes me ache inside. In this world of pop psychology and quick fixes for everything, we lose sight of the fact that building a better human is hard work. We strive to be more than we are, sometimes reaching for an unattainable goal, only to find out that the person we struggle so hard to be isn't really who we were meant to be after all. When we try to change our basic nature to fit the definition that someone else has set, we tread on dangerous ground. We are risking the integrity of our very souls by striving to alter the texture of our personalities. When one's spouse or significant other becomes someone to whom we cannot relate, is it because they have changed, or have we changed? Or maybe is it because we have stopped lying to ourselves and come to face the fact that the ones we have committed ourselves to are not the persons we thought them to be? Is it perhaps better, then, to admit defeat in the face of insurmountable odds and try to salvage what is left of a friendship and allow the wreckage of the marriage (or whatever it is) to sink to the bottom of that metaphorical ocean, secure in the knowledge that we have cut short a sentence in durance vile?

Life wasn't ever meant to be so complicated, methinks. It was supposed to be shorter than it is today, and one of struggle against the elements and the odds. We chose partners based on their general health and heartiness, not on their philosophical bent. We worked the land, side by side, and struggled to raise a family to adulthood so they could work the land after we had died at the ripe old age of 45. If we hated each other, we didn't have long to endure it, because we faded away before we could become homicidal. I believe that in these modern times, marriage isn't meant to last a lifetime. It lasts as long as we can maintain the fantasy, which sometimes turns out to be a far shorter time than we ever expected.