I want to talk about promises. This has been on my mind a bit lately, and I wanted to share it with you. We make promises all the time. I made a promise 12 years ago to marry a man and love him forever. I was very young. I hadn't developed into the person I am now. I didn't know about the things I would learn as the years moved forward. We had a son together. A promise assumes that we know what will come in the future. And I made the promise to get married and love someone forever without understanding how much of the future I had ahead of me. We had been together for 5 years, and at the time I figured that 5 years was enough time for me to get to know HIM. I hadn't given a second's thought to how long it would take to know MYSELF.
We make promises to other people. We make vows and say "until death do us part". We make commitments and say "you matter more to me than my own happiness". Our generation makes these statements, and yet we don't live by them. We get divorced. We call it quits. We move out. We separate when we become miserable. The divorce rate is up to some ridiculously high number. Yet people still get married, and they still make these crazy vows to be with one person no matter what. But they don't live it. We, as a society, don't live it.
I have this radical theory. We should recognize the way our generation goes about love. We should acknowledge that we don't really stay until death. We give up when it's awful. And I think maybe we SHOULD give up when it's awful. I want love. But I don't want to be with someone because they signed an agreement to stay with me despite how they feel about me. And I don't want to live miserably forever because at one point in my life it seemed like a good idea. So what if we didn't say "Until death do us part"? What if we skipped that part entirely, and we said instead "Until we cannot be happy together". I think if we did that, we might treat love differently. We might appreciate our partners more. We might take an extra minute to check in and evaluate. We might not take love for granted. And we might make the commitment to be together, for the RIGHT reasons. Because of love. Not because of a promise.
