Our modern day love drives us into marriages built on wrong and weak premise – we’re selfishly getting rather than seeking to give (what people can do for us and what we can get from them), constantly commanding and demanding without being considerate, very intolerant and manipulating to get what we want from our spouse.
We’re chasing the cash and the material, our love flourishes because of benefits we get from relationships (and ends when the benefit ends). In short, things have gone haywire in our generation!
Years ago – when marriage had a reasonable meaning and enticing to go into, people didn’t need to profess love to one another with their mouth (at every opportunity and every second) to know they are loved – their persistence, support, respect they had for each other and working hard to make the marriage blissful (with all its challenges) was more than ‘unsaid I love you’. The modern marriage is built on dreams and expectations of the good life (not worked for) and enjoying the benefits. If their dreams don’t come into reality – they cry foul forgetting they need to work before they enjoy.
Now, marriage is more of a contract than a covenant. The modern day love is all hinged on convenience. We create our own heartbreaks through enormous expectations!
If I want to marry now (in a typical modern day marriage) – all it takes for me is to profess endless love to a man boy whom I’ve got a glimpse of his possessions, show him my different skills in bed and fake a ‘sex binge’ appetite, keep assuring him I love everything about him and that is it – marriage happens. Easy does it! I don’t care about the future, how responsible my husband will be and the father he’ll be to my children. When things go haywire, I divorce and start the whole process on another man boy.
Some of us don’t have souls but want a soulmate, we’re disabled in one way or the other and want an able bodied person, we can’t trust a person with our strand of hair but we’re ready to trust them with our lives, we won’t marry our ‘likes’ but we expect others to marry us because we’re the best to happen to humanity. We’re searching for our prince/princess charming by ‘shopping’ and kissing many frogs to see who fits ‘the ideal’ forgetting that there’s no ideal anywhere.
Many people have lost their chances because of ‘love’. They missed their ‘angels’ just because they allowed themselves to be carried away by the endless profession of this word, love. Men lose wonderful women because, to them, they didn’t show them the ‘love’ they are used to – not all over them, kissing and cuddling along the road. So many women have equally lost very homely and good men because they don’t make ‘love happen’. As individuals, we can’t love and do things for A as we did for our ex B or expect the new to behave/love like the old – we study the person and what works for them.
It’s not about how perfect and loving a man/woman is at the moment but how perfect and loving he/she will be in the future especially if and when the unexpected happens – a situation which needs only a miracle to solve. Love is not about telling someone ‘I love you’, not the sharing of saliva in the name of kissing, not the bed acrobatics, not the shopping, not the birthday/valentine/Christmas treats and definitely not the intimate dinners and romantic getaways. Many can do that – but it’s actually a few who can and will stick around in ‘not-so-rosy’ periods.
The people we let into our lives can beautify or mess us, make us or mar us. As we age, there are some ideologies and habits we have to let go and face life like adults – not soap operas, fantasies romance novels moments!