A well-meaning friend asked us a lot of times why my fiancé and I decided to marry. He said that getting married takes a lot of work and adjustments as we get to know each other. So, to not marry is a good excuse to just walk away if the relationship hits a rock or a dip. He is speaking from experience, he said, after falling out of love in his marriage and love affairs.
He asked us many questions that really made us ask things about ourselves, which can be summed up to, “Are you getting married just because the culture is telling you that you must?”
It actually made me think deeply about why we decided to get married. Our culture indeed has a lot to do with the decision, even when the society we’re living in already normalizes “living together” without getting married.
And during one of our marriage counseling sessions, our Pastor asked us the same question. We got creative with our answers like, “We decided to get married because it’s long overdue.” But in retrospect, it still doesn’t answer the deeper level of whys until we are reminded about a foundational reason why people commit themselves to one another until death do us part — love.
Loving another person also means accepting their idiosyncracies, seeing them as what makes that person unique.
I am yet to learn what marriage for us would look like, but I was told that marriage is a journey. And I’d be glad to go through it with whom my soul loves.
jessa 