Well, I think that a lot of people who aren’t married have this very romanticized and, quite frankly, warped sense of what marriage is. Mind you, I’m not married so perhaps I’m wrong too.

And two wrongs don’t make it right.

Hmm…

But what is marriage really? To me, marriage—and I’m going to get a little bit too practical for some—is nothing more than really a business partnership. It’s the union of two business interests, a merger if you will, in hopes that the two businesses together will succeed further than the one alone would.

That sentence was syntaxily terrible.

Syntaxily is not a word.

Love.

Most people think that you get married because of love. Or even that marriage lasts because of love. And though I think that would be the greatest thing ever, I don’t actually think that love will see you through everything. Love gets you to the table to eat, but somebody’s got to put something on the table or everybody dies from starvation. I’d even wager that love is easy but relationships are a mother*cker. The meshing of two persons and their issues and baggage can make for a very bumpy ride. Hell, there’s a reason that so many songs allude to the fact that love alone won’t build a happy home.

By the way, I can’t think of a single song that uses that phrase.

If love could save marriages, the divorce rate would be a fraction of what it is now. Even the worst combination of individuals somehow can find love for one another. But what if love could sustain all? What if all you really needed was love? What if after 30 years of waking up to the same person, you got the same butterflies you did after the first date?

What if?

Love is great, but it’s not the most important part of any relationship. People who don’t love each other can stay together forever—because they’re committed to one another, for better or worse.

Commitment.

Commitment is the most important part of a marriage. Without commitment, the marriage can’t even exist. I can love 100 people, but I can’t be committed to them all equally and at the same time. Trust me. Have you ever tried to date, like seriously date, more than one person at a time?

I have and it sucked.

Mostly because I only really had enough energy to expend on one person because at the time, I thought she was the most deserving. Of course, I had other interests that were being met by my other jump-offs ( I was young and bored, sue me), but I was in some ridiculously irrational way committed to the thought that perhaps I could make something work with this one chick…

…at which time I’d chop off the others and make an honest woman out of that one.

Of course that never happened. I got bored. She got even more boring. I hit her with the, “I think I’m not gonna come back anymore” line.

She.Hate.Me.

D’oh well. You win some, you lose some. You live, you learn.

Love and butterflies can be fleeting. We’re all human and everybody doesn’t grow together like we’d like. We hope it happens but let’s face it, some people don’t even know how to grow and you don’t find that out until the 3^rd anniversary.

So what if you could only have one or the other: love with the possibility of an ending because all good things must come to an end (fat ti**ies turn to tear drops and fat a** turns to flab…lol…how apropos) or the commitment of a person who you may have grown apart from, but you grew apart and got old together with?

If your marriage could be built on only love OR commitment, which marriage would you prefer?

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