Two for the Road

I first saw Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney's "Two for the Road" when I was 14 years old, it was the first romantic movie that had an impact on me not because it ends with a Happy Ever After but concludes that marriages are not perfect and love is far more important than being in love. I have seen other romantic movies during that same period but with fairy tale endings but at that time, my parents marriage was slowly degrading, and all my parents could do was fight fight fight...it was a culture of blame, each blaming the other for the other's misgivings. Neither of them took the time to think, contemplate, reflect on their actions and ask themselves why they feel a certain way or act a certain way towards the other person.

I told myself I will never follow their example, but I ended up becoming enmeshed in a fantasy of an ideal marriage somehow influenced by that movie when those puberty hormones started kicking in. It was the story of Mark, an architect and Joanna, his wife spanning 11 years from their courtship to the point where they just could not stand each other anymore and had been thinking about leaving the marriage and ended up becoming involved in extra-marital affairs. The creativity of the movie is not that it occurred over a continuous time-series narration, but it was told by going back and forth through discrete periods in their relationships.

I knew my parents were once very much in love with each other. I could not imagine myself marrying someone whom I am not inlove with, but as human beings, oftentimes feelings change. What we feel about someone does not remain for a long period of time. But what endures is not the way we feel about the other person but the respect, concern, hope and committment that you chose this person to become a part of your life. Marriage is more than feelings.

When Dave asked me to marry him almost four years ago, I knew he was acting on his feelings and at that time he has about to leave for a year long assignment abroad. Most of our peers decided to do it that way but I told him to ask me again when he returns after a year. During our first few months apart, letters come every week, communication was constant. But when he returned, he was a stranger, due to the distance we had somehow grew apart, he was arrogant, bossy, he hadn't listen to any of the things I said and I was already hating him, I assume he also hated my will, because I never agreed to anything he said, I was not submitting myself to things he wanted me to do. We were in love, but we are also operating in an illusion, we had assumed a reality about the other person. We were fighting and I ended up becoming depressed and in one of those fights he just walked out....then he returned.

With reflection we knew we had to work out our relationship, we have to know who the other was, is and what would be and we had to drop our illusion of the others. Iwas no longer the girl of his dreams and he no longer is my perfect architect. We could not say that what we have is a good relationship, but what we have is a work in progress...