Actuality of Love and Marriage from Someone Who Never Been Married

The older I get the more I heard that grandiose question, will you ever marry and settle down? First and foremost, for me, we have to throw the 'settle down' out the window. Settling for anything just makes me automatically go into a mood, that this is something I SHOULDN'T do. Rather it be settle for this oppose to that, settle a case, settle for a girl,  settle for a situation, settle=FUCK NO! 

But anyways....

I remember when I was young, love and marriage were these nebulous concepts that would happen some time in my future. I would often wonder or daydream who I would marry, how I would meet her, how we would get engaged, what the wedding would be like, etc., etc. I think this is pretty normal for most young people.  

What I never fantasized about was what life would be like AFTER marriage. I never sat around and thought about how we would fight, how we would share toothpaste, who would take the kids to school, how we would negotiate and compromise, what our fifth anniversary would look like, not to mention our 50th. 

That's because these things aren't exciting or sexy. In fact, they're quite the opposite. They're quotidian and boring. Yet, they are actually what constitute the majority of a relationship, the majority of love. 

My fantasies about love — like most people's — were limited to pretty much the beginning of the life cycle of a relationship. They were filled of romantic visions of sleepless nights filled with wild passionate sex, fun getaways to exciting location, bathtubs full of rose petals and bubbles and shit. It was awesome. 

But looking back, I was unrealistic about relationships and love. And I think that really screwed me up in a number of ways (if anything, it made me more afraid of commitment, because I thought it was a much bigger deal than it actually was).