It'll be Alright.

Sitting at the desk in our office here in SF, I had a striking revelation that I had never fully realized.  I realized when I think about who I want to marry, I don’t think about how our marriage would be;  I think about how it’ll be after the inevitable point where I shatter, and we live in dissidence till the end of our days.  Never before now have I realized how deep the effect of my parents’ marriage on my life.  

I don’t quite know how to say it.  Especially now, living in a world where our public-everything internet culture is meeting our peoples’ mom’s have Facebook culture.  I still don’t know how to safely talk about it in a light that honors all parties included, but still allows me to share my life experience.  The breadth of the matter is, I grew up in a broken home.  From the moment I was born to the current day, I’ve never known my parents to have ever truly loved one another.  It was simply something I never saw.  While my siblings’ reality was much different than mine, assumably more focused on violence, mine was one closer to a cold war.  I was born into the aftermath of a marriage fallen apart that still stood together.  My parents, with no plans for divorce, were destined to stay together till the end of their days in disarray, unless something happen, which I still pray it does.  

It’s not until now, at 22, that I’m seeing more layers peeled away of the effects this has had on me.  Sitting here at the end of the evening, stricken with the revelation of my view towards marriage, I couldn’t but burst into almost-tears, weeping for the imagination of life I’ve never known.  It’s a dream I’ll have to build from the ground now, I realize.  Never until now have I realized I viewed romance in the lens of how it ends, in the mid-30s, in some series of explosions, resulting in the mutual understanding of a non-love involved cohabitation for the rest of my days.  Though I knew in my soul that this wasn’t my desire, not until now have I realized more fully how much this was my mind’s default thought.  

Even now, thinking about it, I could be married, happily, past 30, 40, 50, 60 and on.  I believe it’s important for people out there to know, this is an odd thought for me, which I even now can’t fully comprehend.  Sitting in my office, I imagined what kinda of after-marriage I wanted:  Did I want a violent, oppressive top down conclusion, or a mutual, effort-stopped, platonic-like romance, etc.?  I’ve thought this thought in some way in every major relationship I’ve had or considered:  How will this person and I be disarrayed?  Because this is the only reality I’ve ever known, this has been my default thought.  As well, I realize very seldom have I been long in the presence of a constructive marriage to realize this doesn’t have to be the way.  

I know now I’ll be pondering this one for years.  If you could take anything away from this, it’s to know, the struggles individuals have gone through, perhaps may manifest themselves in ways that seem, to the mass blatantly contradictory, yet should they never be invalidated.  I’m peeling away the layers on my humanity.  I’m realizing more that I can never predict the complexities of hurt that an individual can exhibit.  For if I can’t even know my own depth of complexity, how can I claim to fully know another’s?  And in realizing this, who am I to be the judge of any man?  That in instead I should concentrate more on the redemption in Christ, which we all receive though the means we individually need it, that the complexity of God’s grace may show itself to duly outshine any error man could ever commit or be subject to.