The Misconception of Marriage

Well today, like every Saturday for the past 10 weeks, I've spent the day (9:00 – 5:00) in classes then the evening (5:00 – 11:30) in the library doing research for my Research and Writing memorandum. As I was finishing up for the night, packing up all of my research findings, I decided before closing my laptop to scroll through some blogs. I came across one entry that, as I read it, I was surprised at how similar my thoughts were to this man’s (Rob) with respect to marriage and the idea or expectation of what marriage should be; needless to say, it stirred my thought processes on the subject.

I first began to wonder how it was that most, or least the two of us, who come from opposite ends of the country, shared this almost identical misconception of marriage. Then I wondered if his conclusion was, in reality, what most marriages become.

When I was looking for a mate to share my life with, I believed that this person would be my sole mate, the person with whom I’d share my deepest darkest secrets, my dreams, my passions, as he would me. We’d side-by-side, together raise our children, we’d shop together, vacation together and enjoy all that life had to offer “together” as one unit. We’d understand each other in such a manner that others couldn’t, we wouldn’t necessarily think alike but we’d be on the same page, or at least somewhere in the same book. In the beginning it is to some degree this way, or it appears to be anyway. Rob had pretty much the same expectations and couldn’t understand how it was that his mate didn’t understand him, his way of thinking, and while they did enjoy certain mutual activities, they were really two very different people.

Rob seems to have come to some sense of understanding or acceptance though, while he and his mate do share certain things, as he puts it, “I realize that we share a lot of history, we share similar goals, we vote for the same candidates, we enjoy the same vacation destinations, we even can agree on most things,” he admittedly doesn’t truly know her and will never know the deepest most intimate parts of his mate. In his words, “I now know that she has other friends who she shares thoughts and dreams that I will never know. . . .I will never know [her] but I will know that that is OK. She is my soul mate but we remain two separate people walking down life's path with two different viewpoints and perspectives.”

I’m sure there’s significantly more to Rob’s story than would appear in this one post, but how can someone with whom you walk different/separate paths through life and you never truly know, be your sole mate?

Marriage, at least as Rob and I had envisioned it, doesn’t appear to exist. It seems many of us go into marriage with such great expectations only to come to the subtle yet crashing realization that it just isn’t that way. So where do those ideas come from? Certainly not my parents, grandparents or, from what I remember of them, my great grandparents, not from my aunts and uncles, friends, etc. Marriage to me seems to be more of a “luck of the draw” game. You choose who you believe suits you and because you’re both young, inexperienced and have an enormous amount of growing to do, you hope to grow together rather than apart and I surmise, simply wish for the best.

My final question of the evening: 10, 20, 30 years down those separate paths, when you come to the realization that this person, your supposed sole mate, isn’t, do you concede, as Rob has, to be quasi-sole mates, accepting a portion of the whole, while each share your secrets, dreams and passions with another?

Time to head home!

Cheers ~