Why are you single?

    • 23
      Sep

    What’s true love?

    I’ve been blessed enough to not only see my parents loving relationship, but to have gotten to see a relationship that was over a half a century. 
      My Mimi met my pawpaw at fifteen. He was her first love and her last love. She can tell you with love in her eyes the stories of how they fell for one another, multiple times. From them having a shot gun wedding, to them renewing their vows, to him bringing her coffee every morning to wake her up, her memories of their life are what you’d think to see in movies. Through the good, bad, hard, easy, lows and highs, their loyalty to each other never wavered. They might not have always gotten along and boy did they fight, but no matter what it was, they worked through it. 

    This makes me wonder, why can’t some of us fall in love and stay in love? We see it every day, people get married, things don’t go as planned, and the marriage ends. We have become such an entitled society that we think we are entitled to an easy marriage, when honestly nothing “easy” is worth having. 

    This makes me think what kind of love I want to have….. Though marriage isn’t easy, I can’t particularly say I want a love like Olivia Pope does “painful, difficult, devastating, life changing, extraordinary love!”, but she does have a point. I pray the lord grants me a love that I’m willing to go through the pain, difficulties, devastating things that change your life and make love extraordinary. A love so true and unconditional that it doesn’t matter how hard times get the vows to God about the devotion to our marriage never waiver. I mean why get married if this is not the kind of love to strive for daily? Why devote ourselves to someone when we look for love in other places? Why not work out our needs with the person we vowed to love till “death do us part?” Are we really the kind of society that now falls in love and marries to just have companionship and not have true love? 

    We see marriages last 72 days and that’s becoming the norm, to get out while we can because it isn’t like we thought the perfect white picket fence would be. My friends, the perfect life without any struggle doesn’t exists. Not one person is entitled not to struggle in life, it just doesn’t happen. Marriage isn’t meant to always be perfect because perfection just does not exist. 

    The marriage I want is like the ones I see. I want the fight, the passion, the devotion, the fire of what true love is. Reading letters my grandparents wrote to one another through the years was eye opening. I saw those things in everything they wrote to one another and the things I remember they said to each other. They had nothing, there children from the beginning, they didn’t always live in the same city, and they weren’t always happy, but they had a love that they were always willing to do whatever it took to make things work. If you were to hear all of the stories you would ask yourself “how did they do it?” I can’t answer tell you how but I can say without a doubt they did. 

    I am often asked, “why I am single?” And it’s because the kind of love I described is the kind of love I strive for. Someone I have so much respect for can fight with or for them. Someone I am so devoted to that I would do anything to help him make his dreams come true and him mine. A man that I love with so much fire, unconditional love, and passion I can look at him 25, 30, 40, 50 years down the road with the same look as the first moment I realize I married my best friend, my lover, my soulmate. Though death will one day do us part, never live in fear of the inevitable but live in light that any day could be our last. If I don’t have that, then I don’t have true love, and if it’s not true I don’t want it. 

    My Mimi and Pawpaw were never perfect, their life could be a movie, and they were in love until his final day…. That’s the love and life I want to live. Imperfect, earth shattering, hard, passionate, thrilling, extraordinary, and unwavering. The kind of love only real marriages from real people, like my parents and grandparents, are made of.  

      
     

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