Wedding Bands and Homemade Noodles

A wedding band does not a marriage make.  It is merely an outward symbol of an inward commitment.  The commitment can be made without the symbol.  It is how the individuals live and love that matters.  My parents celebrated 58+ years of marriage to each other and neither of them ever wore a wedding band.  It was the love and commitment, the continuous celebration.

Hard work?  Certainly.  No matter how much two people care for each other it requires effort  to make the relationship work.  Willingness to make the effort is the thing most often lacking in failed relationships.  "I don't love her anymore."  "He doesn't appreciate me anymore."  A thousand other excuses but underlying them all is a lack of commitment and failure to expend any effort.

If you don't love her now, then you never loved her enough to ask her to marry you in the first place. As Johnny and June sang to each other "We got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout."  A fever, lust, is a flimsy foundation for a marriage..

This started with the simple tableau that played out in our living room yesterday.  BBBH went to the kitchen and retrieved my wedding band which rested in a small cup since I went into hospital, the same small cup in which  she deposits her rings from time to time whilst she is kneading dough or making pie or noodles.  Neither of us feels unloved or unloving during these intervals in which the mere outward symbol is set aside, for the inner commitment continues to thrive.

My Beloved Beautiful Better Half brought the symbolic token to me and said,  "Let me put this ring on your finger again."

"If you had it to do all over again, would you still marry me?"

"Of course.  Just because I get mad at you doesn't mean I don't love you."

Then she lovingly replaced the ring on my finger.

  For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife.  --Jesus Christ