Please Help

Hey there, I'm trying to put together my ceremony (we are writing most of it ourselves) and I want to put in a little blurb on what marriage is about. I have some ideas, but they seem so abstract in my mind - so I thought I would turn to my LIW girls to get some ideas.

So - what do you think marriage is about?

Thanks so much!!!

The key to marriage is not only about love & desire, it's about being commited to understanding & acceptance. There are going to be times when your at your best and they are going to be times when your at your worst, that's when you both need to be devoted to understand..

This is a rough, thought off the top of my head,

I'm stealing these from Frosty because she posted these for me a while back --
I know that these aren't little, but you wouldn't have to use the whole piece...

Both are from Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea and I think that these are perfect:
#1:

One recognizes the truth of Saint Exupery''s line: Love does not consist in gazing at each other. But in looking outward together in the same direction. For in fact, man and woman are not only looking outward in the same direction, they are working outward. Here one forms ties, roots, a firm base....Here one makes oneself part of the community of men, of human society. Here the bonds of marriage are formed. For marriage, which is always spoken of as a bond, becomes actually, in this stage, many bonds, many strands, of different texture and strength, making up a web that is taut and firm. The web is fashioned of love. Yes, but many kinds of love: romantic love first, then a slow-growing devotion and, playing through these, a constantly rippling companionship. It is made of loyalties, and interdependencies, and shared experiences. It is woven of memories of meetings and conflicts; of triumphs and disappointments. It is a web of communication, a common language, and the acceptance of lack of language too, a knowledge of likes and dislikes, of habits and reactions, both physical and mental. It is a web of instincts and intuitions, and known and unknown exchanges. The web of marriage is made in the day to day living side by side, looking outward and working outward in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself…


#2:

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. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.