When I just got married to my husband, I remember resting my head on his shoulder, asking him this one question: “Can we stay like this forever and not have to care about the world?”
“Of course not, babe,” he replied gently. Silly me. But isn’t that what most people think of marriage, that you go on spending the rest of your lives in a tiny secluded island, start living your little happily-ever-afters and leaving behind all the care in the world? “As long as we’re here on earth, we have to attend to it, with other people, living and breathing among them.”
Truth is, I went into marriage fully believing that we’re not meant to be happy. Instead, we’re meant to be holy. And by holy I mean becoming better people who loves choosing to do what’s right more than anything else - even more than we love each other, even more than we love ourselves.
But choosing to do what’s wrong is often what we end up doing. Quick, convenient, risk-free, must get happy NOW and utterly egocentric. Sans deliberation, sans elaboration, sans precision of thought.
For so long, this world has conditioned us to think we deserve to be served rather than serving others. That we can make a god of ourselves through technology. Big, lofty ideas to make yourself look big, when all you’re doing is fooling yourself. Even if you choose the latter, i.e. to serve, your natural reaction is “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM)
Problems accumulate from there. The seed of separation is the fatal WIIFM. And I’m scared if one day our arguments can heat up so much that it tears us into two again. Two separate units, two estranged entities, two spare parts that can no longer function unless they rewire themselves into one thing again; something - anything.
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