30 August 2011

The Paper Means Nothing.

I used to be one of those girls that sat and daydreamed all day long about what my perfect wedding would look like. What would I wear? Who would attend? What would be the color scheme? The list goes on and on. When I got around to my "real" wedding, it was nothing like I'd hoped for, and for that matter, neither was the marriage. When I decided to end it (for a variety of reasons), I determined that I would never marry again, nor would I ever go looking for love.

Yes, I was disenfranchised, but it's to be expected when all my fantasies were nothing but crap in the face of a "real" marriage.

I gave up hope for awhile, not realizing that my expectations about relationships weren't really that high. Beforehand, I'd thought that I could never have the total package and everything that goes along with it. I was so hung up on that piece of paper that I didn't realize what actually constitute a REAL marriage...until I met K.

Finding him came completely out of the blue. I hadn't really been looking; all I wanted was to find someone that I shared interests with, on a purely intellectual basis. And then it blew up into something far bigger, and frankly, it scared me. But we talked about it and discussed our feelings until all hours of the night until I felt a lot better about Falling and Being In Love. Once I felt free to love again, then I experienced it for the first time, with him.

We spent a lot of time talking about the nature of relationships and what makes a marriage. K suggested to me that it isn't the piece of paper that makes a marriage. The piece of paper is from man, a license to wed going against what should otherwise be a completely spiritual experience. He asserted that marriage is a contract between two lovers and God, and that sexual union should never be entered into lightly. In fact, it should only be entered into with the idea that the one you make love with is your intended one and only, and in doing so you declare before God that this person is your mate, for all time.

I spent awhile thinking about that. It wasn't hard for me to realize that there was some undeniable truth hidden there, right in plain sight. I thought about all the relationships I'd had over the course of my adult life. I let my hormones rule my body without my heart being in it, resulting in less than satisfactory results. I even tried sex purposefully without "strings", or "friends with benefits", with the thought that I didn't need to have emotion involved to have "a good time", and it resulted in self-loathing, dissatisfaction, and disgust of my person. I realized that part of the reason they all failed so badly was because the proper motivation for sex just wasn't there.

K and I talked a lot about meeting, and on the first day we did, we went in with the intent to solidify our dedication to each other through sexual union under the eyes of God. It was very much planned, as opposed to being a spontaneous heat of the moment event resulting in yet more dissatisfaction. Some might say that all the magic was taken out of the act through all the planning we did before we went into it, but I found it to be very much the opposite. It was a very spiritual experience, and we both came away solidly feeling that our union would be blessed by God for approaching the matter of sex in that very same profound, spiritual way.

And it has.

I don't believe for one moment that the piece of paper is enough to make one "feel" married. Marriage comes from God as our higher power, not the local government. I learned this, clearly, through all the experiences of my life, and only after realizing the truth have I come to have true happiness.

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