Detach Dog

[25yearsmlc]

Feeling "In Love" is something else, but love is absolutely a choice, it's a verb so it requires action.
Long time loves can lose some of their sizzle/lust, but there's such an upside.

We who have been through the fires and the triumphs of family life, and raising children (including when they were sick in the middle of the night, or broke their arm, or won an award, an event or a race, or came home crying, & your spouse shares this w/you like no one else can...) and working at jobs, on our homes, over years of time...we know what love is.

Like Happiness, Love is a choice and an action verb. It requires sacrifice, and it is a series of acts born of truly knowing another person and wishing them the best...

Though we have not loved perfectly, we want to.

There comes a time in every marriage when each spouse sees the other in total stark reality, without the passion of the new, and see them totally naked, with all their flaws, weaknesses, qualities, strengths, quirks, warts and all, and in that time, We each make a choice.

They may reject their spouse as simply too flawed, no faults of significance or weight are allowed, only the minor ones. Those spouses leave in the hopes of finding more perfect mates.

Others choose to stay, but only to make the other one cave in to their will. They will nag, cajole, critisize, all to "be declared/proven RIGHT" until one of them finally dies...Some choose to stay but they sigh for their whole lives, rolling their eyes in the long suffering manner of the martyrs they see themselves as.

And then, there are others. There are those who see the realities of their spouse along with their own many faults in stark light too.

Somehow they see it all and yet, still, they choose to love. They choose to focus on the good, and to compliment it, and strongly favor it. As for the bad, and not so good, they learn to compensate, overlook, accept, or work around....they try hard to achieve their goal; to see their spouses as God sees them. Through His eyes...

I don't think this means we "learn" to accept what is truly UNacceptable.

God did not put us here to make us miserable. But I think the goal of marital love is to learn to see someone for all of who they really are, including their histories and pain, through His eyes. That does not always mean one stays married to a spouse. But it sure helps.