A Love Story to Share

I received this as an email from a friend. And I have posted this somewhere else already as well.. It's an article written by Jim Paredes, one of the member of the APO hiking society band here in the Philippines. I would like to share this to all of you here.. This goes to all the married couples and those who are still planning...

Change in Eternally Beautiful
Humming in my UNIVERSE
By Jim Paredes The Philippine STAR 11/05/2006

Exactly 29 years ago on Oct. 29, Lydia and I walked down the
aisle. She was 20 and I was 25, both of us wide-eyed but so sure of
ourselves and our decision to stay together forever as we plunged into
matrimony. We were sure, the way young people tend to be certain, that it
was going to be an adventure. But little did we know that it was going to
be a big one, probably the biggest one we'd ever know. Getting married is
like signing a blank check. You have no idea how much it will cost you. You
are committing an unquantifiable amount of material and emotional capital ?
time, money, patience, sacrifice, and an infinite number of things you have
not even begun to imagine that you must deal with eventually.

Many of them are real minefields as Lydia and I, like all
couples, soon discovered. There are the in-laws, kids, expenses, the
balance between career and family life, personal habits, sex, jealousy,
etc. There is also the process of arriving at a "negotiated settlement" on
how to deal with things like getting along with each other's friends, child
rearing, spending habits, religion, hobbies, and how much "independence"
the partners should be allowed. The institution of marriage, as we
inherited it, was very complicated.

One of the things I found out much later in our married life
is that there is a difference between a love affair and a marriage. A love
affair has a dynamic that is different from a marital bond. Generally, love
affairs are not meant to last. They are meant to have a beginning and an
end. Why? Because they are about two separate people bonded by romantic,
oceanic feelings of what seems like love. They live for the intense
feeling, riding it as far as it will go and split up when the thrill is
gone.

Marriage, on the other hand, is the experience of life by two
people as a couple. Many times, new couples discover that they are not an
easy fit, as Lydia and I discovered early on. That's why in a marital
relationship one must necessarily give up big parts of himself/herself to
the union to get a payback. While one may still want some privacy and
independence, one cannot have them without a large dose of a shared life.
From the start until the end, marriage is about two people experiencing one
and the same lifetime.

It starts with romance and the sexual thrill of being with
each other, but you can only count on those for so long. Anyone married for
more than 10 years can attest that there are times when the attraction
which seemed so strong when you first laid eyes on each other as single
people can be non-existent for long periods. Viewed from the perspective of
a love affair, that is certainly not a good thing. One may feel like the
journey has reached a stretch of uninteresting flatlands. The joyride is
over.

But from the perspective of a long marriage, this is simply a
hiatus of sorts, or may even be the first signs of a qualitative the way
one loves. It can be disconcerting at first but if you stick around long
enough, the picture starts to get clearer. While gone may be (from time to
time) the breathtaking highs and exhilarating moments, something else may
be happening. Author M. Scott Peck put it so well when he wrote that "the
death of romantic love can be the start of true love."

In our early years, Lydia and I felt that being married meant
we had to do something dramatic all the time to keep it going. But as we
got older, the doing often gave way to just being. Where before, love had
to be "proven" by the sparkling diamond on her finger, or the great trip
abroad, or the special dinner with wine in some plush place, love in our
29-year marriage feels no compulsion to prove itself as dramatically.
Having long walks, conversations after dinner, holding hands during long
drives, snuggling in bed or just simply being together ? sometimes without
even talking ? have often taken the place of all that. While sex can still
be as great as ever, the truth is, as an older couple, we have discovered
other ways to remain interested in each other. There is not only comfort
but magic in the "ordinary," as one realizes that love can be expressed in
simply caring or supporting each other's steps towards personal and
spiritual growth.

One of the big recent highlights of our journey as life
partners was Lydia 's big cancer scare three years ago. We felt so helpless
as we tried to deal with the fear of losing each other. But we took it on
as a couple. As far as we were concerned, we both had cancer. Those were
days of great emotional upheaval. Ironically, they were also moments of
calm and assurance. Even as we cried about it, we also learned that we
loved each other enough to willingly suffer together because,
paradoxically, by doing so, we eased each other's pain. This may sound
flippant, if not cruel, but looking back, I can say that if I could only
guarantee survival, I would recommend cancer to everyone because of what it
has done for Lydia and me. It has been such a rare opportunity to meet and
accept unconditionally the hard-to-take faces of love that we often run
away from. Yet when we bit the bullet, we opened ourselves to greater depth
and began to see the face of the Divine in the other human being we had
chosen to love. Only then did we realize that all the suffering made sense.


In the end, the very suffering we undergo turns into something
eternally beautiful.


Jim Paredes is a member of the Filipino band Apo Hiking
Society http://www.apohikingsociety.org="">