Love, marriage, and relationships

Wow, that was a long, unintended hiatus from blogging. I've had a lot that I wanted to get off my chest, but never had the time to complete them all, so I postponed and postponed posting, and meanwhile my thoughts grew and grew. I guess it's finally time to open the floodgates.

Here is something I started on 10/27 and finally just finished -

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I've been buried by work these last two weeks, working like a mad man. Been wanting to get this off my chest for a while, since it's been germinating in my mind for quite some time, and finally have some time to write since I got home before 2am for once.

Seeing some of my coworkers go through divorce recently has made me think quite a bit. I've been working w/ them every day for over a year now, and from what I can see they are, for the most part, decent people. Not perfect, for none of us are, but they are your typical intelligent professional/friendly coworker/adoring father. Not assholes, not bozos, not jerks. Good, decent people. And yet now I see them go through these dragged out, excruciating divorces, where they and their spouses fight over money, kids, property, friends, everything. Which makes me wonder - at one point in their lives, they must have truly loved each other, right? Enough so to have wanted to marry one another, start a family, buy a house, and plan to spend the rest of their lives together. Yet, times goes on, people change, and voila, here we are - you get the house, I get the furniture; you get Cathy on M/W/F, I get her on T/Th/Sa... I'm old enough to know that more than half of marriages end in divorces, so I should be more immune to it not. Yet I'm not. I watch them go through these absolutely excruciating, drawn-out sagas, and it still hits me. Hard. Right here in the middle.

What is true love? What should be our expectations of love, marriage, and relationships? I think my perspective has changed a lot, from my own experiences, my close friends' breakups/marital problems, and now my coworkers' divorces. I think, once upon a time, I believed that if you found someone right for you, and you both truly love each other, you can see yourself being w/ this other person for the rest of your life. That to expect to spend the rest of your life with one other person was not unreasonable. I'm inclined to think the opposite now - I don't think it's impossible, but I do think it's improbable. Am I becoming more jaded? I don't know. Maybe I'm more realistic. Perhaps in this way I am getting older.

I think it's a given that people are constantly changing as times goes on in every way, whether it's interests, personality, disposition…every possible way. Whatever attracted you about this person today, may not hold tomorrow because 1) the other person could change, so he/she's not like that any more, or 2) you could change, so you don't like him/her anymore, or 3) both of you could change. Then the foundation of love is ephemeral at best, since for two people to spend the rest of their lives together, not only do they have to change together, they have to change in a complementary, compatible way. If we take two free flowing lines as an analogy to represent two persons' states of beings, respectively, as these two persons change, these two lines will twist, turn, and weave in all different directions. So for two people to stay together, the two lines will always have to be parallel (within certain margin of error) as they traverse through time. What are the freaking odds of that?!

(forgive me for my inner geek speaking out above there. I got to maintain my engineering street cred somehow)

And what does it really mean when we tell a person, "I love you" or "I want to marry you"? When two people say that to each other, I suppose usually it implicitly carries the commitment to love the other person, and the expectation that love will be reciprocated indefinitely. It is supposed to mean "till death do us apart". Or perhaps that's what pop culture instills in us. Yet, can you hold human beings accountable for a commitment that we inherently cannot uphold? Perhaps whenever we "love" another person, it's because both of us "happen" to have what the other person desires at that moment. But when those conditions change, then love evaporates, naturally. Perhaps in her first few years, she wanted romance, passion, excitement. Maybe it's the spiky hair rockers who really strikes her fancy, or that sullen, inner artist that just brings out her motherly instincts. Then, maybe later on, she needed someone stable and predictable, a good father to raise herfamily, buy a house, etc. But again maybe after another ten years, this nice, stable guy just bores her now. He just doesn't do it anymore, and middle-aged her is angsty at her fleeing life, so once again, she starts to cast that longing, furtive eye at someone who really excites her. Perhaps because I was in grad school, and you were applying to med school, we "fell in love" because it was good timing during our transitional years. You hadn't seen any premeds you really liked, and I'd never met a girl like you. And so we're together. A couple years later, you're in med school, you're changing and looking for someone different, you meet some great doctors, and you're gone and we're apart. It's no one's fault, really. C'est la vie. Life goes on, as always. So what did our relationship really mean? Was it just a byproduct of circumstance, that we both happened to be at the "right" place, at the "right" time, so voila we "fell" in love? So what does commitment in love mean? Does it just mean "I will love you for the foreseeable future"; "till I don't like you, or you don't like me, or we don't like each other anymore"? Is that what it means?

Both NYT and Salon had articles on the trend of serial monogamy and how it reflects the rise of consumerism in modern times (damn I wish I had bookmarked them). The abundance of choice, the rise in our "purchasing power", increase in gender equality, and ubiquity of information - do they all contribute to a more cavalier, shopper's mentality toward love, relationships, and marriage? "If it doesn't fit, then find another one?" Since the traditional economic and social benefits of a committed relationship (including, but not exclusively marriage) are decreasing in importance today, why struggle through a marriage and try to make it work? Why not just separate and find someone else? Maybe you two were good for each other ten years ago. But now? Surely there is a better match for you, and him/her, out there today. Why, look at that young hunky coworker down the hall. Or that cute doubles partner at the tennis club. Or your girlfriend's newly single lawyer friend. Or all those guys on match.com...

We humans are such contradictory animals. On one hand, we crave the stability, the safety of knowing someone who will always love us, no matter what. Someone who's always there for us, who accepts us for who we are. Yet on the other hand, we are constantly changing, and so human relationships could never provide us this stability that we crave. Perhaps this is where some people turn to religion. If there is a God, then He will love me no matter what, right? He will never change and never abandon me, since He is by definition unchanging, right? That's not my answer though, unfortunately. So what is? The happiness of self? That strikes me as a bit narcissistic. So what else is left?