Expressing Your Love – vol. 2

I enjoy this ceremony reading at weddings because it speaks to our human nature and the reality of a relationship. We are all in constant motion and what happens to us, or our loved ones, throughout our life does affect the relationship we have with our spouse. I think it is important to recognize and understand that…not only for us, but for our spouse.

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.

-An excerpt from Gift from the Sea
by Anne Morrow Lindbergh