Thoughts on Marriage -- before Marriage
I am sitting here next to my lovely fiance, Maria. She is the sweetest, most beautiful woman I have ever met. Love is an amazing thing. It is like fire--sometimes we solely wish to behold our beloved; but love has also become cheapened over the last number of years. It has been degraded to the point of pleasure-seeking, and boiled down to only romance. Commitment has taken a back-seat in the vehicle of love. The thing about pleasure-seeking is that it, in the end, only ever leads to emptiness. It leads to desiring more and more pleasure, but this desire can never be fully satisfied. The rise in failed relationships and divorce has shown that, when people only seek pleasure (and, by this, I mean pleasure in a myriad of ways) and not self-sacrificial altruism, relationships don't last. It does not help that our culture has heavily promoted this mentality of "seeking only that which benefits me, myself, and I". It is rare to find someone in the public-eye who promote