Walking away.

I find it hard to understand why people walk away from marriages without so much as a second look. Did they not take a vow of through thick and thin, in good times and in bad? No one said marriage was easy...hell, life isn't even easy. But, from everything I have ever learned nothing in life is more precious than the things that are worth fighting for.

It is hard for me to believe that people would take marriage lightly. As something to be toyed with and then thrown away. Why would you walk away from something that you promised to invest your everything in?

I am guessing, there wasn't much thought put into the decision to marry in the first place...and if thought was there maybe emotion and love was not. I think that to many marry because of selfish motives rather than the need to marry for the right reasons. I understand that there is a time and a place to marry for selfish reasons but there is also a time when you don't...when the other person is actually in love.

The engagement, planning of a wedding and the whirlwind idea of becomming newlyweds leave little room to think about the big picture. They don't allow for you to see 6 months from now, 5 years from now or 20 years from now. Which is why people need to go into a marriage realizing that times won't always be perfect. There won't always be the firecrackers when you kiss or the butterflies in your belly at your lovers touch. There will be challenges. There will be fights.

Marriage is about two people loving each other and working actively not only to further build their relationship but to further their love. Marriage is about finding someone you love, trust, respect and value you enough to not only spend the rest of your life with but to make sacrifices for. Marriage is complicated...it needs to be broken in and the kinks need to be worked out and it may take years for those things to happen but in the end the triumphs and challenges, the tears and joys, the thick in the thin will all work out to be that fairytale that you once dreamed of.

So, why walk away? Why walk away from something that once made you over the moon happy because times have gotten rough? Because walking away...no matter how happy you are in the future no matter what path you find yourself on will leave you wondering "What would have happened?" What would have happened if you fought harder? What would have happened if you gave in? What would have happened if you really allowed yourself to love? Would you be happier? Would you be less happy? And unfortunately, you will never know. Because while walking away from something allows us to possibly reinvent who we are and what we want out of life it doesn't allow us to forget the whirlwind that marriage is. The vows that we took or the love that we claimed to have felt and walking away from something that was possibly worth fighting for will always stay in the back of our mind as a thought wondering "what if".

In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find, and continue to find, grounds for marriage. ~Robert Anderson