Commitment Beyond Love’s Wilderness Experience

Seasons of rockiness,

Years of turmoil in a row,

Put paid to marriage’s cockiness,

Yet soon, in perseverance, we grow.

Calamities are despairing,

But hold on we must,

All it takes is caring,

To endure the sense of distrust.

If the unit that is “we,”

Has any chance at all,

We have to learn to breathe,

That, or we may fall.

Kindness and compassion,

Stand us in good stead,

They help when we’re crashing,

Giving reason why we’ve wed.

Truth is we stand to learn,

Commitment’s a simple wonder,

No better love do we earn,

Than the one we’ve not put asunder.

When Uncertainty Comes

Uncertainties come to test our relationships at the least expected times. As life is dynamic and unpredictable, so are our fortunes. A good season won’t necessarily follow a bad one, and vice versa. Just focusing on goodness and fortune can be a trap of itself.

Sometimes our relationships are proven by the tests we have to endure.

When uncertainties come and spill over from our personal lives into the lives of loved ones there has to be an effect. Compassion is issued to a degree, but even compassion wears thin. One person’s chagrin invokes another’s, and so a process commences of individuals polarising into themselves.

The two who have become one begin to become two again.

Next thing there is a gradual walking away—not a physical thing, but a spiritual thing. We spend less time together. Interests diverge and suddenly we need and want less of each other. Though we mightn’t feel it at the time, the relationship has reached somewhat a crisis point. But most relationships experience such stretching.

How might this end?

Relationships progress either one way or the other; the divergence continues into an unknown oblivion or the gravitation pulls the couple into the original alignment.

When Honesty Reignites Commitment

If partners to a marital relationship can be honest with each other, and their love remains, desires enjoined, there is the re-ignition of commitment.

Where mutual desires meet with passion, and there is a unified hunger for intimacy, commitment is the vehicle to a soothing reunion of souls.

Together with honesty and the special ingredients of feeling—of wanting what “was”—commitment, as that vehicle, gains traction.

When relationships have a future it is love that compels us to invest in honesty that reignites the commitment that was once taken for granted.

The re-firing of commitment requires honesty, which, in turn, is evoked by courage. And courage is what we need in enduring the dry season. Not the courage of bravery, but the courage to persist and to have faith that goodness will again be known in the union.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.