for better or for worse....
"to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part"
may be the vows you say in a church wedding ceremony, but they are also a pretty good guide for any committed long term relationship.
But what happens if only part if it is being followed ? what if it is not being followed by both partners ?
I was fully signed on for the whole deal. To have and to hold kind of goes without saying, but what if your partner decides not to ? Does the remaining partner's "holding" turn into "clinging" as the partner tries to stop ? You certainly start to feel like you are being unreasonable just to hope for a hug :( I felt like *I* was in the wrong and yet perhaps it was my partner's missing "to have and to hold" that was more to blame.
My aim was to manage the finances to avoid the "poorer" but then poorer is a relative thing, not absolute. It doesn't say "when both above and below the official poverty line".... and we did become poorer with my redundancy, as I was unemployed and supporting us on savings (hence have less savings now) and subsequent jobs were at a lower salary. Certainly I was poorer with him than without him.
In sickness and in health: well LTC certainly managed more than the average amount of sickness - or at least as far as I was aware. I now hear tales of him striding about the local area when I was out at work, and he was always quite vague about exactly which doctor he saw and so on. Who knows ? He was always appropriately solicitous when I had the odd moment of ill health...
to love and to cherish.... well it seems I did, and he didn't. At least all the evidence points that way. How can you love someone for that amount of time, leave them, know they have found out something horrendous that might topple them over the edge..and NOT make a single attempt to find out how that person is, how they are coping ? Even if you knew you could never explain, never make it up, wouldn't you at least miss that person ? I would, but then I guess I would never manage such a huge and lengthy deception, so would never be in the situation in the first place....
And now I come to "for better for worse"... at what point does "for worse" become unsustainable ? At what point is "worse" something you can and should walk away from ? So often we seem to see examples where everything has been smooth sailing when it was all "for better, for richer, in health" but the moment one of those has changed to worse/poorer/sickness, the relationship has fallen apart. I didn't get that - if you loved someone, them being less rich, less healthy, less "better" didn't change who they were ? And if it was the person you loved not their situation, then that love would surely continue under duress ? By being together you could find a bit of better/richer/healthier inside the worse/poorer/sickness...
So where do you draw that line ? I think it is when one of you is not there in the full sense of "for better or for worse". But more than that, if you look at the full phrase, if one of the partners is not fulfulling any one of those, it all starts to fall apart. It may fall apart quicker, or slower, but it WILL fall apart.
I accepted the general outcome being that I was poorer, and less healthy (more stressed that's for sure) as long I thought we were a partnership. But with time it become horribly clear that we weren't. And then it seems a high price to pay.... for what ? Whilst it seems a harsh and selfish thing to say, the price would have been worth paying if there had been the "to have and to hold, to love and to cherish"... but there wasn't.
The optimist in me wonders whether that purpose can be refound, rediscovered, so that the partnership renews and continues. And perhaps that is the recipe for a truely successful long-lasting relationship, that the shared purpose is continually refreshed and renewed as we travel a path together ?
may be the vows you say in a church wedding ceremony, but they are also a pretty good guide for any committed long term relationship.
But what happens if only part if it is being followed ? what if it is not being followed by both partners ?
I was fully signed on for the whole deal. To have and to hold kind of goes without saying, but what if your partner decides not to ? Does the remaining partner's "holding" turn into "clinging" as the partner tries to stop ? You certainly start to feel like you are being unreasonable just to hope for a hug :( I felt like *I* was in the wrong and yet perhaps it was my partner's missing "to have and to hold" that was more to blame.
My aim was to manage the finances to avoid the "poorer" but then poorer is a relative thing, not absolute. It doesn't say "when both above and below the official poverty line".... and we did become poorer with my redundancy, as I was unemployed and supporting us on savings (hence have less savings now) and subsequent jobs were at a lower salary. Certainly I was poorer with him than without him.
In sickness and in health: well LTC certainly managed more than the average amount of sickness - or at least as far as I was aware. I now hear tales of him striding about the local area when I was out at work, and he was always quite vague about exactly which doctor he saw and so on. Who knows ? He was always appropriately solicitous when I had the odd moment of ill health...
to love and to cherish.... well it seems I did, and he didn't. At least all the evidence points that way. How can you love someone for that amount of time, leave them, know they have found out something horrendous that might topple them over the edge..and NOT make a single attempt to find out how that person is, how they are coping ? Even if you knew you could never explain, never make it up, wouldn't you at least miss that person ? I would, but then I guess I would never manage such a huge and lengthy deception, so would never be in the situation in the first place....
And now I come to "for better for worse"... at what point does "for worse" become unsustainable ? At what point is "worse" something you can and should walk away from ? So often we seem to see examples where everything has been smooth sailing when it was all "for better, for richer, in health" but the moment one of those has changed to worse/poorer/sickness, the relationship has fallen apart. I didn't get that - if you loved someone, them being less rich, less healthy, less "better" didn't change who they were ? And if it was the person you loved not their situation, then that love would surely continue under duress ? By being together you could find a bit of better/richer/healthier inside the worse/poorer/sickness...
So where do you draw that line ? I think it is when one of you is not there in the full sense of "for better or for worse". But more than that, if you look at the full phrase, if one of the partners is not fulfulling any one of those, it all starts to fall apart. It may fall apart quicker, or slower, but it WILL fall apart.
I accepted the general outcome being that I was poorer, and less healthy (more stressed that's for sure) as long I thought we were a partnership. But with time it become horribly clear that we weren't. And then it seems a high price to pay.... for what ? Whilst it seems a harsh and selfish thing to say, the price would have been worth paying if there had been the "to have and to hold, to love and to cherish"... but there wasn't.
Trouble is the partner who is still committed often doesn't realise or see that the other one is not. That somewhere in that vow they have a problem. Commitment is about "the trait of sincere and steadfast fixity of purpose" - as soon as one of you is no longer commited to the shared purpose of a partnership, there is a problem.
The optimist in me wonders whether that purpose can be refound, rediscovered, so that the partnership renews and continues. And perhaps that is the recipe for a truely successful long-lasting relationship, that the shared purpose is continually refreshed and renewed as we travel a path together ?
posted by seahorse at 8:44 pm
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