Romantic Love and Marriage

Romantic love demands obstacles. While we fall in love and before mystery inexorably turns into history, we discover the obstacles and barriers that exist between and before us. The more romantic we are, the more we embrace those obstacles while simultaneously combatting them. Let's face it, we cherish the obstacles that make us weep in frustration. They remove the weight of conscience from dulling our resolve. All's fair in love and war. They spur us into action.

Our obstacles provide our loved ones and ourselves with a common enemy which presents barriers towards more conventional levels of committment. The ultimate committment is marriage (ya know the thing that takes place after the party known as the "wedding").

Marriage is not only the conclusion of comedy but also the end of falling in love as well as the begining of life's great interpersonal combat and conundrum...the matrimonial state. The matrimonail state represents the harrowing paradox of antagonistic cooperation which includes the battle for the higher moral ground ( or in some cases the lower)

It is natural for us to fall in love because as we fall we fly  and as we fly we discover ourselves through the eyes and on the wings of another. The other does what we want, what we imagine, what we crave. We are sure that the other does these things because they are what he/she naturally wants to do and in that regard we are in synch with destiny.

We suspend our disbelief. We are not yet familiar enough for contempt, scepticism or suspicion of ulterior motive. All that will come later when mature love is what we need to overcome

When we think of immature, romantic love we arrive at Romeo and Juliet who considered their love to be something to die for. If Romeo and Julet had lived, their story would be far less romantic. Perhaps their story would be more epic, more courageous, more humorous but only fractionally retold with the bias of those who knew them, which wouldn't include me or gazillion others.

They would have been a married couple.

A play might not have been written