Commitment

My husband and I were relaxing the other night, watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. One of those commercials came on, with a lovingly compensated couple crooning about the wonderfulness that is their partner. We rolled our eyes.

"Yeah, we'll see how loving you are when you have to hold her hair while she's barfing on you!" I hooted.

We laughed together about the absurdity of those match-up commercials as we went to sleep. I'm not knocking these websites specifically. I just think that they portray love in a very distorted way.

There's so much more to a relationship than that goofy initiation phase, and I get very tired of having that kind of love in relationships emphasized over and over. It sets a bad example, you see. People(aka impressionable teenagers) see that version and think that that is what romantic love is all about, 24/7. On television and in the movies, couples are either madly in love or they hate each other. Reality is very different. Reality is about making a commitment to each other.

My husband decided that he loved me when I quickly downed a bottle of beer and then burped louder than him in the parking lot outside the bar.

But his commitment was sitting in the ICU while I was in a coma and he didn't know if I would ever wake up. I, in turn, held his hand throughout his cancer diagnosis and treatment. That is what commitment means: sticking around during the bad parts.

Life happens, and things can get ugly. Messy. People fart. People snore. People scratch themselves in embarrassing places. Sometimes they do all this in close proximity to you. At those times, love is not really the word that may describe your feelings, unless you are really weird.

It is in the trenches of the relationship that you forge a relationship, not the peaks. 'For better'...that part of the vow everyone remembers, and that is what those dating websites are selling. It's the 'for worse' that nobody thinks about before walking down the aisle. If you're not willing to stay with your partner during the 'for worse' times, however, you're not as committed to the relationship as you may need to be.