Marriage Moats-Repetition

Published: Wed, 09/14/11

Marriage Moats

Caring for Marriage

(Listen to Lori read the story at)

Life seems repetitive. I am caught in a never ending pattern of mundane motions that stretch out before me, with no end in sight.

I make food. People eat it. I wash clothes. They get dirty.

Each piece of the marching routine is in itself inadequate, yet tethered together into a whole it can sustain a family.

Marriage is a chain of actions as well. We solve some problems, and don't solve others. We hug goodbye and smile hello. Each one alone is too weak to hold up a relationship, but welded together with hundreds and thousands of other efforts is grows tenacious.

What bugs me about movies like Titanic is the message it conveys about instant love. The entire tear jerking saga takes place in twenty four hours. Excuse me but love takes longer than that to hold up under the strain of real living. To imply that it happens with one day's worth of fervent commitment makes me rabid.

So I plod on, sometimes with a hop skip, other times with a drag limp. But when I look back over my shoulder I glimpse the symmetry of little efforts all lined up. It is beautiful. And strong.

Photo by Jenny Stein

you can support us at