it takes years....

[vernacular_life]

I was clearing out old stuff from my hard drive and came across the file of our wedding ceremony, and specifically, the readings that we included. This one was suggested by the minister, and I found it much more us than any biblical passage.   I printed it out on nice paper (along with the other reading, a poem by Yeats) and stuck them in our photo album....

It takes years to marry completely two hearts, even of the most loving and well matched.  A happy wedlock is a long falling in love.  Young persons think love belongs only to the full‑haired and crimson‑cheeked.  And so it does, for its beginning.  But the golden marriage is a part of love which the wedding day knows nothing of.  Very few are married totally, and then only after many years of growth in wisdom and understanding. 

 

Such a large and sweet fruit is a complete marriage that it takes a long summer to ripen it, and then a long winter to mellow and season it.  But a really happy marriage of love and judgment between a sincere and loving man and woman is one of the things so very good that if the sun were, as the Greeks fabled, a god, this god would stop the world and hold it still now and then in order to look all day long on some example of such a marriage, and feast its eyes on the very spectacle of it.   ‑‑ Theodore Parker


So many of my friends, both here and IRL, have had marriages/long term relationships fizzle because they mistake infatuation with love...


x-posted to mature_marrieds

Comments

[lkell.livejournal.com]

that's beautiful!
(I recently added you from tinksdust's friends list.

[stephbairey.livejournal.com]

A lovely sentiment. :) I've had a LOT of people tell me that to give Pete a second chance after cheating was a huge mistake, that I should have walked and not 'let myself' be treated that way. They have a point. But none of them had been married as long as we have (12-15 yrs depending on how we count) and they don't know 'the rest.' Marriage is more than monogamy. Monogamy is way important, yes! :) But "many years of growth in wisdom and understanding" doesn't come cheap. It comes with mistakes and pain and regrets.

I guess I don't need to say that. Just, thanks for a nice post. :)