Sep 20 2008
Marriage- What Does It Mean To You?
I am off today to celebrate the one year anniversary of my baby sister’s marriage to the father of her two children. It is crazy to realize that it has been a year. She is my baby sister and she has been married for a year. As I think about it, it made me begin to think about what marriage means to me.
When I was a little girl, I never wanted to get married. I did not view marriage as something two people could enter in to and honestly keep the commitment they made before God and family. That may have something to do with the fact that my Mom and Dad are separated. They have been for as many years as I have been on this earth -31. It may have something to do with the fact that my Mom was involved with a married man for almost as many years. It may have something to do with the fact that during my childhood, I didn’t see many married black folk. Yeah, my grandmother was married - it was her second husband and she always talked about how “sorry” my Mom’s dad (her first husband) was. It may have something to do with the fact that all of the books I read and shows I watched when I was a kid showed happy, married white families. So maybe I always thought marriage was a “white thing”.
Either way, I never planned to take the plunge. It was not because I did not believe it to be a beautiful sacred thing. It was because I believed in it so much, I refused to make the commitment to someone if I could not hold up my end of the bargain. I guess you could call me a commitment-phobe.
Anyway, as I plan to head home to celebrate my little sister’s matrimony, I begin to wonder how much my opinion has changed on the whole topic of marriage. I am in a relationship that is going on three years and he is my best friend. Should he pop the question one day, I am certain I will say yes. I will say yes because I love him and I can’t imagine life without him; but, there will be a small part of me wondering if I can truly live up to the promises I make. Can anyone? How do you make it past the broken promises to get to the other side where the love still exists?
