“It’s not just picture perfect dancing in a white dress…” – Jake Scott, Tuesdays
True confession: I’ve been watching the Bachelor. I pretty much disagree with everything about the show, but it’s a fun girl-bonding time and well, it’s been an eye-opening reminder of our culture’s mainstream view of love and relationships.
This one girl was talking about how her second time seeing Colton she was ready for a ring — or not even a ring; she just wanted to marry him.⠀
I was baffled.⠀⠀⠀
I think of all Clay and I have weathered since this day of picture perfect dancing and how marriage is so much more than this grand ideal of love — how it’s real, hard, life.⠀
How could someone know they want to spend their lives with someone upon meeting them twice?
I think one of the reasons our divorce rate is so high is that we so often view our love stories with a laser focus on their beginnings — the butterflies, the attraction, the dream of a wedding. When in reality if we want to have a lasting love story, we must start viewing them as a whole — the beginning, the middle which is full of good and bad, beauty and darkness, triumphs and the trials, and the end being death that parts us.⠀
Ben Rector sings, “Life is not a snapshot; it’s the walking in between.” Life is the walking through the valleys and the mountain tops alike. Marriage is a partnership in which you dance under starlight and weather storms. It’s not for the faint of heart but the dedicated of heart. It’s for those who want the whole story, not just the fairy-tale-like beginning.⠀
Would we be a culture who dates more responsibly, who doesn’t get caught up in mere infatuation, but who takes the beginning of our love stories as seriously as we will take them when life throws us some serious curveballs. Would we use our heads right alongside our hearts to write love stories that last.
