Vachon Imagined

When a relationship becomes about denying your own needs to make another person comfortable, it is no longer love in its purest form.

It is denial.

And denial, left unattended, always seeks another voice.

People eventually explode.

Sometimes upon themselves.

Sometimes upon those they love.

Sometimes upon strangers who had nothing to do with the wound that had been quietly gathering beneath the surface.

Such is the human condition.

Deny yourself long enough and the forgotten parts of you will find another way to be heard.

Love yourself, and those same parts no longer need to fight for your attention. They are welcomed home. You learn to walk with yourself instead of asking another person to carry what was never theirs to bear.

So often marriage has become a worldly event.

Look closely and you will see it.

The celebration.

The photographs.

The money.

The attention.

The beautiful promises.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things.

But they are not marriage.

Marriage is not a celebration.

It is a quiet dying.

Not the death of the self, but the death of the illusion that another person was created to fulfill every longing within you.

No one can.

Not completely.

Not forever.

The moment we expect another human being to become the source of our peace, disappointment quietly enters the room. Expectations harden into resentment. Resentment becomes control. Control replaces freedom. And love slowly gives way to negotiation.

This is why even the most mature among us rarely understand what we are saying yes to until we have lived it.

Marriage reveals us.

It shows us where we still expect another to rescue us.

It uncovers the places where we have mistaken dependency for intimacy and possession for love.

Your partner will never meet every need.

They cannot.

They will change.

They will fail.

They will grieve.

They will disappoint you.

One day, one of you will leave first.

Such is the nature of life.

Yet when love matures, marriage is fulfilled.

Not because every need has been satisfied, but because love no longer depends upon another person’s ability to satisfy it.

It becomes a marriage of the soul.

A marriage of union.

A quiet knowing that says,

I love you.

Not because you complete me.

Not because you rescue me.

Not because you never fail me.

I love you because I have made peace with who you are.

And I have made peace with who I am.

Even if you leave.

Even if you change.

Even if death parts us.

Even if you wound me in ways I never imagined.

I choose not to abandon love.

For love was never yours to give me.

It was always ours to live.