On Love, Marriage, and Staying True to Ourselves

     Life has a way of shaping things up and tip the scales one way or another. Tough situations tend  towards showing our true colors and our choices determine who we are, it is our choices that give us power or take it away, our choices that shape our beliefs and our convictions, more importantly, it is our choices -not emotions- that drive who we are in love with. When I first met my wife, she stated something that I thought was ludicrous but came to understand to be true: Love is a choice. I recently had to remind her of those words that Love, while initiated by an original attraction, let's call it "chemistry", grows over time through attachment and, more importantly, a choice to make it grow, and to strengthen that bond. When we got married, I was fuly aware of what was ahead of us, a long road full of joy, pain, sorrow, love, some hatred and a whole spectrum of emotions.
     This spectrum of emotions, and differences of events are the bond which strengthens only by going through it together. This is not to say that couples or loving relationships require the participants to become the same, in fact, I would say it is the small differences that make it work. Anybody who knows me and my spouse would almost instantly notice that we are extremely different, from the way we address different people to our tastes -though some similarities cannot be avoided- for instance, she's a little bit country, and well, yeah I'm a little bit rock'n roll. She loves, let me emphasize on this, loves romance novels whereas I thrive on either Sci-Fi, fantasy, or non fiction. She is also one to take time to process information and that makes her a great student, whereas I tend to go with the flow of information and analyze on the go, great for analyzing, crappy for studying as the information I retain is more conceptual than comitted to memory. Interestingly enough, our couple, I believe is stronger than most, as we are not only willing to work through our differences, but also embrace them.
     This brings me to my last point of the post: staying true to ourselves. Changing for the ones we love is inevitable, there is a lot less murders because we, as social beings, do change over time in order to adapt to our surrounding. In staying true to ourselves, and I do mean our core, not the superficial concepts we deal with everyday such as music or movies, or even what emotional state we typically find ourselves in, we allow that first spark of "chemistry" to remain, and grow even stronger. Most of the enjoyment of life lies in the challenges we face, and the feeling of accomplishment we get for surmounting those challenges, we do not want somebody exactly like us as a life partner because then life would be boring. The first few years would be great, yes, however, as time goes by the amount of excitment in doing the same things over and over again become minimal, to the point where the original spark of "chemistry" is extinguished and there is nothing left but boredom. My wife and I argue a lot about different things, our opinions differ greatly from one another. Heck I have been a non-believer for quite some time now and she barely realized she did not believe less than a year ago, to put that in perspective, we have been married 10 years.
     In conclusion, and this post may not be read by a lot of people but quite frankly, I don't care, I challenge those who read this to ask themselves what they are looking for in a potential mate, is it common interest and complacency? is it adventure and complexity? Or is it merely the idea of companionship? I would love to tell you that I have figured out the key to a perfect marriage, but as far as I know there is no such animal, and looking for it is merely an exercise in futility.