Monday, October 15, 2012

Happily Ever After Again


 
Happily Ever After Again. Stitched words: 1994 Married 1995 Divorced 2009 Remarried. Xylene photo transfer on tea-stained muslin. Hand beaded and stitched. Unframed 25" x 31"; Framed: 31" x 37".  Click on image to enlarge.

Love and marriage! They're complicated matters for many.... and I'm really glad I don't fully understand the emotional toll of a significant break up. I met my husband Steve during an Ohio State football game. I'd been a college freshman for less than two weeks. He was a first year graduate student. I wouldn't date him for months thinking he was "too old" for me.... twenty-two. I really had no serious experience with guys at all. I was scared. But, once I gave in, we became a couple.... waiting for the "right time" to get married. Had it not been for college tuition, the need to introduce one another to our parents, and all the other social requirements of an actual ceremony, I would have married Steve within a month. That was in the fall of 1977. We got married in 1981.... and have joked that the only way out of this relationship is for one of us to die..., which is only a "joke" because it is true.

Over the years, we've had many friends suffer the pains of divorce, failed relationships, and the problems of being both "married" to the "wrong" person as well as "being single" when a relationship was most wanted. I've come to appreciate my own happiness on a deeper level. Love and marriage really are complicated. There's no "easy" answer.

When asked why our relationship works, we don't have a "magic" formula. What seems "simple" to us really isn't "easy". So many external factors could change everything in an instant. What brought us together, what keeps us together, what could drive up apart, and what would allow us to find one another life partner is as complicated as the road these two people have walked. Once they were married, then divorced; but they found one another again.

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