Happy Valentine’s Day. I hope you have someone to share it with, but if you don’t (like me), take yourself somewhere fun today. Love on yourself!
I always wonder about those millions of couples who married on some past Valentine’s Day whose marriages didn’t survive. This must be a melancholy day for them, as it is for those who have lost their spouses, whether they married on Valentine’s Day or not. My heart goes out to y’all even more than it does to everyone who can celebrate this day in a full-throated way.
My niece and nephew are among the lucky ones, married on Valentine’s Day, whose marriage survives and thrives. Marriage takes work, compromise, and talking things through, and finding new ways to stay in love as one’s partner evolves, grows, and learns more about life, love and perhaps career and/or children and/or pets. And every new “love” can make a partner feel less loved unless pains are taken to express one’s love more purposefully.
How DeForest Kelley’s Happy Marriage Lasted 54 Years
When I asked DeForest Kelley during one of his apperances at a Star Trek convention to share some of the ingredients of a successful marrriage (at the time, he and Carolyn had been married 45 years, as I recall, and their marriage lasted until his death in 1999 — 54+ years and more if you count their courtship years) he replied,
“Well, the first thing you’ve got to do is pick the right (partner). That’s number one. And naturally you fall in love, and then, when you fall into life, you’ve got to sustain the love. And the love has to grow into a deeper thing. It becomes a friendship that is intense and becomes like two people living together and loving each other deeply about it. It’s a kind of a thing that nobody can really put into words. And in this business (show business) you have got to be awful lucky, too, to stay married. If you don’t go hide, they’ll kill you! Thank you very much for asking. I don’t know that I’m the easiest guy in the world to put up with, and I’ve never asked her…”
What I Know About Marriage is Mostly Hearsay and Observation
I have never been married or in a romantic relationship,so I’m the last person to be giving relationship advice (but then neither had Leo Buscaglia, the love doctor, so there you go!) but I am a keen observer of relationships between people (and between animals, too) and it’s pretty easy for me to discern when a relationship goes south, and why, in most cases. Often it’s when one partner begins to take the other one for granted, or when they belittle or marginalize the other, or try to rule over the other. (We’re animals, too. So this assessment applies across the board.)
I know that when I am in strictly platonic relationships (commonly called friendships), I tend to believe I’m the smartest person in the relationship (well read, pretty well traveled, open-minded except in the case of “bigoted others”), which is absolutelyNOT true in many cases, but I also want to please and appease whoever I’m with because I loathe confrontation. So, it’s absolutely best that I remain single because confrontation is often necessary in a marriage when things start to become unbalanced or unfair. I usually stew until I can’t take it anymore and then throw a fit. That’s far too late to create a serene, satisfactory outcome.
Plus, in addition to being transgender (male mind in a female body, sans breasts) and not having the right anatomy to perform the way my mind thinks my body should, I may also be “ace” (asexual) because I don’t lust after anyone of either sex, or ever wonder what it would be like to be in bed with them. (Yeah, I know. I pretended to lust after Doctor McCoy, but that was performance art; in reality, I wanted to be LIKE De/McCoy, I didn’t want to hop in the sack with them! I was playing the part of a “woman” until I came out as trans in 2015 or 1016). I don’t believe that being ace is where it’s at for most men and women. Most people want an intimate sexual relationship and are always on alert to see if they can find one worth sustaining (or not — some people just like the adrenaline rush of flings; different strokes for different folks!).
A Toast to the Marriages and Relationships that Last a Lifetime
Anyway, I find it amazing and wonderful when two people find each other so irresistable and endlessly fascinating that they want to get and stay married (through all life’s many changes) ’til death parts them. It must be (mostly) wonderful, or they wouldn’t keep at it. Again, it can’t be easy, but it must be worth it for those in relationships that last from the first day to the last that they share together on the earth plane.
I lift my glass of orange juice to those of you who create love that will last for a lifetime!
