Personals: On Marriage

Williams and Gosling play a young couple
crazy over each other in Blue Valentine (2010)

At the early age of 17, I have thought to myself that I am not the marrying type. Blame it on my frequenting HBO and watching Carrie Bradshaw and pals express their disdain on the accursed ceremony that measures women (more or less). But, hey, they have a point. People stay together for love, marriage is only important if you're a practicing Catholic or if you want legality over insurances and conjugal properties. For financially secured people who have no trouble finding a new place and who don't have kids (or can't have), marrying is irrelevant.

Plus, let's face it. These days, happily ever after, if you're lucky enough, means three years.

A marriage that occurs too early in the relationship, especially for our country, may only result to a lengthy and expensive annulment case--which destroys every bit of happy memory a couple may have shared and chose to keep. It is thus more logical to keep the M word at bay until, say, the 6th year of the relationship--when you are really really sure that you can wake up everyday to the same face and find the happiness you went in the relationship for amid the nagging voice when you purposely left the dishes on the sink the other night.

The same couple above, now older and falling apart.

Relationships take real work. One day you are crazy over each other, then the next you realized you've spent so much time getting to know someone only to find out that the other person is a stranger. Imagine wanting to get out of something you didn't sign up for, but thing is you've signed up for it. In front of the state. In front of the Church. And all that ties to your property, and it's all gonna be messy and emotional. No one breaks apart without an expensive emotional cost. And aren't we all afraid of that emotional cost? Yet we see a lot of people so sure, so headstrong, diving into marriage only to bemoan that it did not work for them, that they are unhappy, that they want to make it stop.

Love is easy. Commitment is difficult. And marriage is a commitment of a lifetime that can screw you and your partner for the rest of your adult lives if you made a mistake. And if you have kids, good luck with them as well. It is the right thing to do, most of the time, but not always the easy thing. And with what I've experienced so far, it is the last thing on my mind. To me, I feel, as long as a relationship is happy, marriage is only for papers and legality; it is a lock to assure that the happiness remains confined within two parties and two parties only.

I respect the sanctity of the sacrament, thus my feelings towards it is both of fear and trepidation. I would always doubt if it is for me, or if I am the marrying type, not simply because I watched 4 whiny American women bash it only for all of them to end up marrying, but more for the fact that it is not something I can be honestly completely comfortable with. Maybe when I find the right person, and when the right person decides that I, too, am the right person. When I've found the lion after all the giraffes. And when I am the lion, too, to that lion. Maybe then can I say that marriage is something I would need.