Can you fall in love with someone even while knowing pretty well that you don’t see a life partner in him/her?
Maybe it’s that you know her ENOUGH to understand that you two are incompatible as life partners. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still be in love.
And, if yes, doesn’t it mean that love and marriage are separate, and we unnecessarily push our minds to think that anyone who loves us wants to marry him?
Isn’t marriage merely a socio-economic system in which two people decide to live with each other — and perhaps start calling ‘dependence on the other’ as ‘love’?
Why should we grieve those loves that could not lead to marriage? Why can’t we just love someone without expecting to spend a lifetime together? We should only grieve those loves in which we knew we would live perfectly together.
And do you remember an episode in FRIENDS in which Joey proposes marriage to Rachel when he finds out that she is pregnant?
Remember, he was not in love with her then. It was just a friendly act on the part of Joey to stand with his friend. It showed that love and marriage could be fundamentally different.
Suppose one day Ron dumps Hermione in a fit of rage. Would it be wrong for Harry to propose her to marry? Of course not. Proposal is always “for marriage”, not for love. ‘I love you’ doesn’t mean ‘I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’ It should not.
Love is of all kinds. We tend to mistake one love for another and trouble ourselves with unnecessary speculations and predictions.
And there are cases when we know that the other one would be perfect for us, and yet we don’t take another step simply because either we consider them to be too good for us, and/or we think we don’t KNOW them enough to take a decision for life… sigh…
In other words — Is love enough to take that decision? Does the act of ‘finding more about the person’ important for taking a lifetime decision? Isn’t marriage without that act of finding more (even if there is love) a kind of settlement?
Most of the times we cannot take another step, because even our first one ‘of trying to understand the person’ is considered as a prima facie announcement of lifetime fidelity.
Love and marriage are different.
—
This post was previously published on Hello, Love and is republished here with permission from the author.
—
***
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
Talk to you soon.
—
Photo credit: Raffaello Sanzio