looking at wedding pictures online...

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Looking at pictures of my friend's wedding makes me realize that I was a wife in my soul from age 21-31 and still leaning that way all the way up to April of last year. I had a deep need for the idea of lifelong love to be the truth even though I have known in a different part of myself since I was a teen that I would never marry. I have only recently let go of the thought of marriage as the ideal, the ultimate goal and the truest form of commitment.


I am weeks away from 39 and then only 1 year from 40 so my perspective has become more than a bit cynical. With engagements to "baby-mommas" not turning into family in a legal sense... and even those that did get together finding them suddenly apart in divorce... and the lack of marriage in the adults I grew up with and they would stay together for 10+ years. FYI Christians, It isn't the gays that ruined the sanctity of marriage. It is America's own lack of commitment to ourselves and the way that society and modern life have changed even in my short lifetime.


In my world "till death do us part" is a misnomer because I have known that I will not see death since I was 16 so for me it has always been until he dies or otherwise leaves. Now this phrase is completely invalid as 2009 found me surrounded by people who have discovered and decided to follow that deathlessness in themselves. This is why there can be no marriage in heaven (heaven being that time when all of us stop dying and we are returned to the original pure state of being before death was introduced to human existance). If no one dies the commitment takes on a new meaning entirely. We are whole as individuals and come together only when it is a compliment to both. This is the new life I live.


As a Christian I have been bound by the spiritual idea of marriage and as a woman I have been tied to the social idea that some think that the feminist movement had all but squashed in womankind: that idea that marriage is a completion of our human state of being.


Now this is not to say that I do not still want that comfortable companionship with a mutual commitment. It is just to say that I have no longer attached myself to naming it marriage when the act of marrying has lost so much of its original meaning.




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