Dear Jil, I can’t over-emphasize this enough: marry someone you love, and who loves you! It doesn’t mean you won’t have quarrels. Couples disagree ever once in every while or less. But the love you have for each other will keep pulling you together. Love has a gravitational pull.
Because you love each other your heart won’t be able to sustain the stress of a quarrel. Love always wants reconciliation. It takes a lot of stress to maintain a quarrel. It’s always debilitating, always takes a toll. At some point the quarrel will burn all its energy. To sustain it, new forms of energy are required. Thus old quarrels are rehashed, and you begin to escalate things interactively in your imagination. Any act or omission, whether right or wrong is converted into fuel to sustain the fight. These acts are “irritabilities.” Quarrels are maintained by the conversion of matter, innocuous acts and history into fuel.
Stubbornness and pride also sustain quarrels. They’re potent energy – derived directly from the being of the host. It’s why such disposition tells on the body. It takes an awful amount of energy to sustain a quarrel through stubbornness. You can’t sleep well, you have tension, headache, pain in the heart. A relationship quarrel is a major health challenge. You can’t imagine what it actually takes to maintain a quarrel for a whole week. It’s debilitating. And now you have to wonder about those who maintain quarrels for a whole month, some for years. Such emotions leave a crying pain in the head – a mixture of desire, and impotence to do more damage. What love does is suck the oxygen out of a quarrel.
Love is not negative energy. It cannot fuel a quarrel. It’s why you’re left with that ashen taste in your mouth after a quarrel. Love ashens anger, kills the smoldering. And then you experience befuddlement as to what the quarrel was all about! You realize you’ve exaggerated issues. The flame of anger reddens the molten iron of pain, making it malleable under the hammer of hurtful desire. It’s the reason a quarrel can bend in any direction. And how quarrels become instruments of pain. All that’s required to kill a quarrel in a relationship is just someone burying his or her pride. Once you remove pride in a relationship everything becomes easy. Love is not proud. In fact love is so accommodating it hardly notices it when the other person does it wrong.
Love is not looking for faults. Love just accepts the imperfections of the other person and lovingly “complains” about those imperfections. But if you marry someone you don’t love you may end up despising the person. Despite is only a hop away from hatred. You don’t want someone despising you in your relationship. It’s painful and hurtful. It’s an awful feeling. Once hatred enters a marriage or relationship it begins to regulate the articles. Everything will suffer. But love… There’s nothing like love. Love just.. It’s so strong… Far stronger than hatred.
It’s hard to describe a home full of love. There’s just this ambiance… this indefinable essence. A home full of love is full of harmony. A home full of love is full of tenderness. A home full of love is full of affection. A home full of love is full of understanding. A home full of love is full of accommodation. A home full of love is full of joy. A home full of love is full of peace. Marriage is a long-term proposition.
If you can’t love someone, don’t marry him. You’ll punish him. If you marry someone you can’t or don’t love, the marriage will become a gaol – for both you and him. And you can’t tolerate your husband. That’s not healthy for you, or him. Irritability will set in. Then despite. Hatred and despite galvanize repulsive energy. Create a toxic environmental state. Love is so fundamental to a marriage. Don’t marry just to add a 3-letter prefix and dot to your name. It’s awfully myopic. That’s a wedding not a marriage.
And don’t let people goad you into marrying someone you don’t like or want. That someone promised to get someone a wife has nothing to do with you. You’re not a promissory note. Your life can’t be used in fulfillment of an order of favour to someone, or to curry goodwill. If the man introduced to you is not the man you want, don’t do the introducer a favour with your life. Say NO, thank you! All you’ll do by marrying a man you don’t want is give the introducer the self-satisfaction of fruitful introduction. People like to boast they introduced a couple. It’s some sort of emotional trophy. But what’s the value of that to you if the merger is a bad equation and life investment option? Then what? You’re stuck with a man you don’t want, and soon everything becomes patchwork. You will drift apart from a man you don’t love. There’s nothing holding you together. The years will widen the fissure.If the only reason you want to jump into a marriage is to please someone, please rethink. It’s never wise.
Do you see yourself with this man ten, twenty years down history? Do you see yourself raising children with him? Do your values agree? Your interests may not fully overlap but values are important. When interests are divergent love is the organic glue. But when values are divergent love turns down its responsibility. Please don’t kid yourself love is not important in a marriage. Disasters are made of such assumptions. A marriage you cobble together to remove the stain of social leprosy can metastasize into full-blown depression. Some things are not worth it. A loveless marriage is one of them.
Your mentor,
LA
© Leke Alder 2014 | talk2me@lekealder.com