At two p.m. today I passed the 52nd. anniversary of my marriage that actually ended in 1998. I never remarried. Once was enough and the truth is I actually knew him for two years before we got married.
I've learned a lot from that marriage and the subsequent relationships. The biggest lesson is perhaps that I am not really a candidate for such an intimate relationship. I tend to become subservient to whoever I am close to and then I resent it. The next biggest lesson is: do not marry anyone who isn't already your best friend and the person you can share anything with. I have one of those and it is so much more fulfilling than my marriage ever was.
The other side of forging such a relationship has nothing to do with me. Unless it is that I am wiser now than I was fifty odd years ago. Marrying a second time, or late in life should come with warnings. Do not marry a divorced person. They are divorced for a reason. (Yes, me too.) And do not marry someone who has never married by fifty. There is a reason for that too.
Marriage is a legal construct that mostly benefits any children resulting from it, but it is certainly no guarantee of that either. My husband decided he was done financing the kid's education when he was remarried to another woman. He still uses them to move his furniture, etc, but feels no real need to nurture or care for them. He doesn't even know the correct birthdays for two of them!
I have a wonderful relationship with a person who does not live in my home, nor I in his. We have no mutual restraining orders on each others' lives and we feel no need to lie or contort ourselves in any way in order to love each other. It is, perhaps, the most perfect relationship I have ever been in. I trust him explicitly.
And I think trust may be the most important trait in the world.
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