I've been thinking a lot lately about why we end up with certain people. It started earlier this week when Veronica wrote a blog about accepting and loving the imperfections in other people and culminated today while reading this blog about not marrying the love of your life (beware it's a tear jerker, or maybe I'm just super sensitive).
Daily I am amazed that I managed to end up with the love of my life, and daily I am still afraid that I am going to do something to mess it up . I didn't marry the love of my life, twice. And based on our history I truly didn't believe that I ever would. Not to discount the people I did end up marrying. I was in love with them at the time that I made the decision. But there was always something missing. I was usually able to forget about the missing piece but then something would happen. I would see Josh on Facebook or he would come to visit and everything that was missing was shoved in my face and made evident.
One of the great things about our relationship now, versus when we were teenagers, is that we have so much history together, and apart, that we know exactly what the others imperfections are. I hear more and more often of couples who didn't start off with each other as adults but ended up with each other in the end. When you meet someone as a child or teenager, and then you watch them grow as an adult, you see them for who they really are. Especially when you haven't made your mistakes together, you have still watched the other person make those mistakes. You know what their weaknesses are and what there downfalls are long before you choose to be in a relationship again. You have watched them grow without the rose colored glasses, because for years you weren't looking at them as the other half of you. You were looking at them as individual with their own life and their own problems. The years between remove the rose colored glasses and let them just be a person. Even if you know deep down they are who you were meant to be with.
I spent a lot of our years apart worrying that we were going to end up like the couple in the second blog, knowing that we were supposed to be together but never quite being able to make it happen. I knew the years that Josh was in Iraq that there was a possibility that I was going to get the call from my mom saying that something horrible had happened. Which is probably a lot of the reason that I did get married twice, and spent a lot of my mid-twenties convincing myself that he wasn't the one who got away. It was too scary and too much for me to handle. The "what-if's" drove me nuts, do I just lived in the happy little world of denial.
Lucky for me the stars aligned and Josh, being who he is, shoved the reality of what he had both been forcing ourselves to live without right in my face. Forcing me to make changes, The awesome thing was, that he didn't expect the changes that I was making to include him. It just worked out that way because it was supposed to. I lucked out. The horrible didn't have to happen, we didn't have to spend the rest of our lives without each other. We wised up and realized that we needed to figure out how to be together, and the challenges that we had avoided in the past could be damned.
Commitment is such a weird thing. Almost as weird as falling in love with the person you were meant to be with at the age of thirteen.Choosing to commit again after failing multiple times. Choosing not be the bitter divorcee who will never commit or get married again, isn't east to overcome. Choosing to spend the rest of your life with someone, to give someone your every day and your every night is hard. Promising that you are going to support them, whether you agree with their decisions or not, is something you don't take lightly. Let me tell you though, when you know that you are going into a relationship without the rose colored glasses, when you can recognize the hard reality that is personalities and compromise and weaknesses and faults, that's where you find the real commitment. That is where you know that things are going to work out for the best. There is no honeymoon stage, if there was it was almost 20 years ago. Relationships like this one are based on experience and reality. And that is why they work.
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