my mother told me

My mother told me, "When poverty comes in the door, love goes out the window." It's true, looking back at our journey there were turning points where I wasn't sure if we'd be together. Those were hard realities. Realities that soaked my pillow at night.

I wasn't sure if I could handle years and years of hearing him complain of his dead end job. What it was is that I don't know if I could have weathered years and years of hearing how he was so unhappy at something that my love could not fix. It's not that I'm not willing to go through the lows, but I didn't want the "lows" to be the norm. I wanted a partnership with a partner. At a certain point in our relationship, I had doubts about whether we were going in the same direction. In the end, we managed to find ourselves in the same direction.

I guess this is the reality of my generation and marriage today. Coming from an immigrant family where to even contemplate divorce requires an intervention from the entire family, and yet have society tell you, "oh it's ok, it's just your first marriage", makes the idea of marriage a complicated one for me. I guess we could have cohabited like so many people do. But in my heart of hearts I'm a bit of a traditionalist and wanted to be married. Even amongst my mother's 12 siblings, one of them was contemplating divorce, and may still be, but for now they are together.

I'm lucky really to have for the most part decent examples of good marriages in my family. I have friends whose example of "good marriages" in their families are filled with cheating hearts and abusive relationships. And those kinds of examples make my generation of Filipinos say, then why even bother getting married? How do you know that the guy you pick today won't be the schmuck 20 years from now? Thus, the pressure to choose very very well.

I've watched my younger cousins getting married and for right now they seem to have made decent choices. They picked guys who had similar values and wanted the same things in life and whose personalities really balance them out. A lot of them in one way to be fortunate to be immigrants who ended up with other immigrants who shared the same rule and values of "no divorce."

I actually envy them in a way. How the choice to get married to the one you've been with for so many years seems to be an easy one. And if you've been with someone for more than 2 years, well of course, you marry them. Or even my one cousin who was dating this guy for a few months before deciding to get married. How easy it seemed for them to just get married.

In my mother and the Fiance saying that "love in not enough," it's not to say that love is not needed, it's the basis of coming together in the first place, but from what I can gather, it's not the only thing needed to build a strong marriage. Love is not the solution when your partner doesn't want to have kids and you do. Love is not the answer if you want to save for a house when your partner keeps spending the savings away. And though there is love AND happiness, it does not mean that love=happiness.

Love is the thing that brings you together. It's the thing that keeps one foot in the door when you might want to leave. Love is the thing that makes you want to be a different person in order to give and support the other. Love is the thing that makes you believe that the other person will come through for you in the end. But love is also that thing that tells you to walk away when the other person just isn't ready. Love is the thing that allows you to let them go because you can no longer make them happy. I am a romantic, but I'm also a pragmatist. And like in the marriage class we took, love is a choice. And when everything is coming down on you, love is a difficult choice to make.

We both had to come to terms with a level of honesty and truth about ourselves, because "I do" comes well before walking down the aisle.