Organic Marriages

We heard about another marital breakup today.  This news seems to be a common feature of our stage of life. To our own surprise, we woke up one metaphorical morning recently to find our marriage a much more complicated thing than we ever thought it could be.  We were the "perfect" couple, or so we were frequently told.  Maybe that was wishful thinking on someone's part, that there really is such a thing, like unicorns or great white whales.  The news would appear to be bleak, according to current figures.

We have come to learn that marriage is not a thing apart from us in which we dwell, but a living entity that demands the same nurturing, tending, and attention that a garden does in order to thrive and produce.  Leave a garden untended, and the weeds take over, the flowers go to seed, the lettuce turns bitter.  Our marriage is a good one, twenty years in the making, but we just figured out the garden analogy.  The friend of ours who just let us know his marriage ended mentioned that he and his partner had become roommates.  We'd heard that same line in the movie "Date Night."  It's an easy role to fall into.  Comfort is a great thing, but it can easily morph into numbness.   We've been making the extra effort to tend not only each other, but ourselves, even consulting a professional.  It's weeding time.

We're planting our garden and cleaning up from a stormy winter.  We're tending things outside and in.  We fell in love over 20 years ago for reasons we've recently decided to uncover and bring fully back to life, and even finding new reasons. It's spring.