Will you hold my hand as the world ends? Will you still think of me?

Today marked the first wedding I'd been to as an appreciated personal invitee, rather than an obligatory extended family member. It's strange that family members who I've known all my life and who I'm supposedly important to usually leave me feeling distant and out of place, but this gal and her hubby whom I've known for barely a year and haven't spent a whole lot of time with left me glowing and tearing up with all the rest.

Actually it's not strange at all: of course someone who I'm connected to by choice will touch me more deeply than someone who I'm connected to by cultural obligation. Which is exactly why marriage is so strange to me--it turns voluntary relationships into obligation.

Now you have to stay with me and love me and share with me. Don't want to? Too bad, you made a vow.

Obviously, the divorce rate is evidence that these vows aren't quite that sacred and unbreakable. But if you believe in divorce, and intend on leaving yourself an escape route should things turn sour, why make vows in the first place? There seems to be a belief that's beaten into us from childhood that love is only "true" if it lasts forever. In order to believe that they are loved, people want that promise as proof. This is the ideal that most of us are taught to seek, but eventually most people need freedom, and promises are broken. How many young couples (maybe old couples too, I don't know) swear that they'll always be together? How many actually are?

"I've never been in love before. I only thought I was."

Or maybe you were in love, but something changed and things didn't work out. People aren't static, so why should relationships be?

The other thing that confuses me about marriage is how public it is. Even if it's a small wedding for family and a few friends, how can two people reveal their feelings to anyone but each other? I imagine myself in the position where I actually want to promise the rest of my life to someone. No one else in the world would be able to truly understand what that meant except for that one person, so why should we try to communicate it to a group of gawking spectators? Marriage is like a common ground for lovers to land on so that onlookers can watch and say yes that is or no that isn't love. An attempt to communicate the incommunicable.

Why put boundaries on something so wild and boundless?