Since my engagement over the new year, I’ve been continuing my ask to people in my network of why they made the choice to marry, since I am curious about how they tick in their evolved relationships. I hear your typical answers, and then I hear the more esoteric answers as well. I also hear practical answers, and non-romantic answers.

Some of these answers include the following:

• “I just knew he/she was the one; it didn’t take long.”
• “I wanted someone who I knew could be a good mother to my children.”
• “Sometimes, we need to make sacrifices in our life in order to go to the next level.”
• “She has no drama. I go flirt with other girls in front of her, and all she says is ‘how charming he is’ and smiles at me. She is the kind of girl I feel like I could start a family with. You know, I don’t believe in being ‘in love’ – that’s bullshit. That’s just your emotions talking. You can fall ‘in love’ then fall ‘out of love’ just as fast. I’m looking for the real thing – someone I can develop a life together with. For me, that’s no drama. That’s all I ask, and I will take care of her for the rest of our lives.”
• “I had no other choice.” (sad)
• “I knew when her happiness was more important to me than my own, that was it.”
• “It just… sorta happened. One day she was like, ‘ok, we’re getting married,’ and that was how it happened.”
• “I knew that I did not want to live the rest of my life with anyone else.”

Recently, I was asked by people if I was “in love” with my fiancee. I think either due to my experience of 36 years, or due to my stoic nature, or perhaps due to the nature of my relationship with my fiancee, I’ve learned that the idea of being “in love” is in my mind a purely emotional state of mind. When people hear my response of “no, not really- but I absolutely do love her, and there is a difference,” they get shocked. Perhaps it’s because I had lost that childish romanticism that generates all the butterflies and flurries in one’s stomach — ahh, to be young. For me, I think it evolved into a much more mature sort of love; it turned into a love that appreciates, respects, and considers the other in a special way that transcends the vagrant pleasures of being “in love.” I’m learning more and more that this kind of love is a deliberate, intentional sort of love that takes SO many more factors into consideration than the hot warmth of simple sexual attraction – to put it bluntly. And yes, this complex, deep kind of love is a mature love which in book, is a critical requirement to building a family and a whole life together. It’s the kind of love that perseveres when the going gets tough. It’s the kind of love that sacrifices self-interest on behalf of the other, and willingly and sometimes even joyfully so. It’s the kind of love that wants to see the other experience joy and happiness in life. This is true love. The people in my life who have either failed to recognize this or deliberately choose to “think with their dicks” over anything else are the ones who I see consistently struggling with why they do not have healthy relationships or developed families in their lives. And hey, I’m guilty of this in my heyday years as well, I’ll be honest. Perhaps this is why it’s taken me so long to find this true kind of love, and it’s my own damn fault.

One of my fiancee’s happily married friends say “the day I stop looking, is the day I die.” While he says it jokingly, I know there’s a degree of truth to his statement. It’s not an affront to his marriage relationship with his wife – it’s true, sexual attraction will always be intrinsic to any two people who find each other attractive, because of the way all humans are wired. To be faithful and love one’s one and only in the midst of these natural factors is yet again, real love. I know one might think – hey, it shouldn’t be so hard if people are in love, right? But my observations seem to suggest otherwise. I’ve seen many folks tough it through the ups and downs of married life, and the ones who make it are the ones who are truly deliberate about their relationship with their betrothed.

I’ll add this – I’ve noticed that human (mostly adult) behavior is highly subjective to the law of entropy. Structure, discipline, and deliberate love are constructs of human efforts that drive away the gravitational pull of primal, basic, and sometimes even intrinsically evil human nature. Yep, I said it- we’re all evil at heart, at one level or another. Those who are blessed with the ability to keep this natural behavior at bay should thank their lucky stars – the rest must work at it, and work at it deliberately. We are, after all, broken human beings living in a broken world. And for those who have no faith in anything beyond what we’ve got here, well, hell – if this is the only world we’ve got, and this is it, you might as well “go for the gusto” and live life for yourself. A double-click into this is a topic for a future blog (Pascal’s Wager).

I’m only touching on the entropy of human behavior here as an appetizer for a much more in-depth exploration for yet another blog topic later, but I mention it here because it is one factor for each and every of us, and especially those who are in a marriage relationship. Because without deliberate love, and without the day in and day out of working at a relationship, it has the natural inclination to devolve, be it distance from each other emotionally, physically, sexually, spiritually, or any other possible way. True love, as it seems to me, is a constant battle to fight this entropy, in its various forms. People who get lazy about their deliberate love are the ones who fall apart.

I can already hear the married folk of many years pining at me with “talk to me when you’ve been married 28 years.” Truth is, I have spoken with people who have been married way longer and it seems to be the same story over and over again. Selflessness. Deliberate love. Genuine consideration for the other.

I’ll continue this topic in the near future – but for now, it’s time to grab a beer with my brother Sandip.