Choose to Take the Journey

This weekend I attended my friend’s wedding. It was a beautiful affair with roses, candles, and of course, a deejay. Surprisingly, I found myself paying close attention to details that I thought might enhance my own wedding someday. I say ‘surprising,’ because for most of my adult life, I was cynical of even the idea of marriage. Having been cheated on, having seen so-called perfect couples fall apart before my eyes, having read the sobering statistics on our country’s famously high divorce rate, I wasn’t exactly inspired to tie the knot back then.

But then I realized that I wanted to be a great father, that I wanted to be closely involved in raising my kids, that I wanted my future wife and I to become the old man and the old woman holding hands in the park, at 85 years-old and beyond. And in order to do that, when the time comes and with the right girl, I would have to just commit 100% to making it work. An amazing girl once told me that the reason the older generations didn’t divorce as often wasn’t necessarily because they were trapped in loveless marriages, but because of the attitude they brought with them going into their marriages. Back in the day, when something was broken–a toaster, a bicycle, a relationship–people didn’t just run back to the marketplace to pick up a new one; they worked on it until it was fixed.

In fact, I recently read an article saying that the majority of unhappily married spouses who chose to stay the course reported that their marriages were happy 5 years later, and that the most unhappy of the bunch were the ones who experienced the most remarkable turnarounds.

Interesting.

Congratulations to my friend. Good luck to her, and to the rest of us as well!