Marriage Is Not About the Butterflies

When a person gets married there is a feeling of excitement, beyond hopeful, almost arrogant. There is seemingly nothing in the world too complicated to navigate. It is a beautiful sort of naivety. A kind which carries the couple through unbrushed teeth and makeup-less faces. It sweetly calms a new marriage with superficial triumphs – that feeling of a “special love” allows a bride or a groom to easily forgive things which would under normal circumstances cause a loss of respect or affection.

A lot of people smirk at new, young couples who exhibit this sort of new love. A lot of people seem to enjoy being in on some disappointing secret: that the butterflies eventually fade and “special love” becomes something clawed for. But I love seeing people act that way. I enjoy watching two people completely infatuated. Though I know that a couple who “never fights” is not a sign of a healthy marriage and that sometimes affection isn’t something I can easily give (even to the sweetest man alive), I also remember that I am learning these things in my fairytale and that every person who tried to teach it to me with a smirk was of absolutely no help.

The truth is that God created us to feel those feelings of sublime romantic love for a little while so that we would begin the real journey. If we all knew the pain that comes with loving someone we would stay at home on Saturdays and eventually the last lonely human would die. The truth is that sometimes love hurts. Sometimes the last thing on your mind is how to make another person happy. Sometimes you may even want out. But sometimes love surprises us doesn’t it? Perhaps it subtly comforts us when our lives become too hard to handle alone. Or maybe it loudly proclaims that we have the capacity to be much more than we allow ourselves to believe. While those initial hopes and dreams are lovely, the day-to-day commitment is absolutely breathtaking.

For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, in good times and bad marriage is an intricate and remarkable connection that has the potential to be a catalyst for innumerable lessons. In our culture marriage means very little. Divorces are common transactions which are becoming easier to attain every year. This is not exclusive to the secular world; believers are taking part in the trend as well and by the thousands. Despite being told that marriage is a picture of Christ’s relationship with us, we take it lightly and not only enter into it with little consideration, but choose to leave it based on our selfishness. If God operated in His marriage the way we do in ours we would be in a completely hopeless situation. Whether it is convenient or not, marriage provides the most obvious platform for the Christian to show God how seriously he takes his relationship with Him – in good times and bad, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer… For many of us this means that we have a lot of work to do.

What Disney never tells you is that the prince and the princess disagreed on what kind of meat to buy or how to raise their royal children. The real fairytale is that they were committed to loving each other and that’s what makes a happy ever after.

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  1. velmoreberry said:

    Brilliant!

    May 12, 2010
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