You meet someone and you fall in love. Head over heels in love. You move in together. You merge your families. Children's lives collide with your new relationship yet you fight to keep moving ahead. A past relationship intrudes with your relationship yet you fight to keep moving ahead. You get married. The world collides with your new marriage and yet you fight to keep moving ahead. Health problems ensue and yet you fight to keep moving ahead. All in the name of family. All in the name of love. All in the name of marriage. All in the name of life as we knew it.
You know there are problems and you realize that nothing you are trying is working so you retreat, hiding your tears in hour long baths and behind closed doors of your bedrooom, unable to fight anymore. Unable to keep fighting to move ahead. Then someone sends you a screenshot of your spouse's profile on an online affair website and your world as you absolutely know it comes tumbling down. He promised to never do it again. He promised there was no one else again. But in the end there were several. Several people and several different online profiles. In the end nothing had ever ended. And that was life as we knew it.
Hearts broken on both sides. Lives shattered. Children in the mix, the mess. Lives separated. Objects separated. Divorce follows. And yet you fight to keep moving ahead.
This is life as we know it. The new us. The generation of not fixing it because it is easier to let go and move on than it is to fix it and hang on for dear life knowing to your very core that the person you are fighting with is the person worth fighting for.
We are the generation of temptations at every turn. Social media, online dating sites, online affair sites, gaming systems, long hours at work and every other little thing we can throw in the mix. All serve as a reason to not have to communicate and truly not give your all to make something work, whether it is a marriage, a relationship or a friendship. I am guilty of it. We all are at one time or another, whether intentional or not.
We no longer focus on the "me" to know who we are first and foremost and we no longer focus on the "us" to know what we want and need in the other person and what the other person wants and needs from us. Everything and everyone else becomes more important. We are no longer the people that "court" and "date" as our parents and grandparents did. There are rarely flowers, rarely doors opened, rarely a hand asked for marriage. We just do. We chase, we are pursued. We push and we pull. With reckless abandon. The romanticism is lost on a generation that no longer has the stories of Gone With the Wind and Casablanca. We are the lost generation of saying I love you and knowing it comes from the heart, deep within the soul.
Recently I was asked what I will do different. What will I do different? All of it. There will be no fool rushing in this time. There will be so much communication that there will be no secrets and no need for secrets. The person on the other end will probably tire of me before anything can get started. There will be date nights, alone, without phones on both sides. There will be private, stolen romantic moments. There will be random I am thinking of you texts and random flowers and gifts, just because. There will be great family memories made, together, with all of the children with no separation between whose child is whose. Just one. All of us. That will be life as we know it.
I will know this time there will be no fight or flight. It is a "Sit your ass down and let's work this out right now" type of relationship. It is finding the one that tells me I am beautiful every day, whether my hair and makeup are done or I am sweating with a sports bra and yoga pants on with a pony tail. It is finding the one that looks at me like I am the only one in the room. It is finding the one that makes me see there is no one else in the room. It is the one that I look forward to seeing every moment of every day and the one that I know I cannot rise or fall without him by my side. It is the one that knows how I feel without me saying a word, we would know each other that well. The weak need not apply, for sure. This will be life as we know it.
More than that, it is the one that will be my everything and I his. It is the person I am going to face the world with. Beside me. Not behind me and certainly not in front of me. My equal. My soulmate. The world will come full circle. And in the end, that will be life as we know it.
http://memosfromthedarkside.blogspot.com/2014/05/life-as-we-know-it.html
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