Marriage Moats-Hard Ride
Published: Wed, 10/19/11
| Marriage Moats | Caring for Marriage | ||||
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 This man signed up to ride in a grueling bike race. As far as I know he was not coerced, or misled as to the difficulty involved. He may even have paid good money for the privilege.
People take on unreasonable challenges all the time.... marathons, rappelling, triathlons, weight lifting, hiking the Appalacian Trail. They are seldom rewarded, in any tangible sense of the word. A few elite runners at the front go home with a purse. But for most of the thousands of people who hurl themselves into such a race, the praise or prize at someone else's hand is irrelevant.
I am not so inclined. I navigate toward other goals, like the summer I made a dress for every letter of the alphabet for each of my twins (A apple, B butterfly, C chicken). I wanted to do it. Somewhere around Q I wondered why, but when I designed queen dresses I was back on track. Currently I am sewing little girls' dresses for a craft sale, and am putting in as many hours as some underpaid third world workers. But I chose this. The momentum is strong, and if I tried to stop now the tire tracks would stretch half way up my road.
Marriage is as much of a marathon as the ones in Boston and New York. People spend time training, and finding the right athletic gear. They tell their friends, and psyche themselves up in a hundred ways.
But all the buddies and protein bars in the world do not erase the pain, or mop away the sweat. It is still incredibly hard. But since when is hard a bad thing?
Photo by Andy Sullivan
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