LIFE SENTENCE

“What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Mark 10:9 KJV)

(originally posted exactly three years ago today)

Nowadays, coldness grips the whole country due to relentless rain everywhere. Besides, it’s cool season despite the unpredictability of climate as we’re now in the months of “ber,” or “brrrr.” Once again people are practically panicking as if there’s a so-called gold rush in marrying. I noticed this anew when I recently stood as one of the principal sponsors of one of my best friend’s wedding.

You could see genuine smiles fixed in their faces as single young men and women uninterruptibly grinned with the couple the entire ceremonies. You could detect the fire in their eyes as they found it hard to hide their burning desire that sooner than they expected, they too would be in those marriages.

Tsk, tsk, tsk. I’m pretty sure I know what is in the mind of those poor guys, that married life is all bed of roses, or a walk in the clouds if not hovering in the skies. It is, only however if you’re ready mentally and psychologically, let alone financially, have a superb understanding and a good grasp of all aspects of marriage and have attained maturity. 

When you are shocked to find yourself one day that upon looking at the mirror you suddenly remember you’re still single although you’re already past forty, relax, baby. Don’t panic, be still, never mind those creases and the siege of light and shades of gray. Marriage is not a race; its success will depend on how it ends, believe you me. As, this I fully guarantee, age is not an accurate barometer of a person’s maturity. There’s a normal old man who still thinks like a child and a teener who reached early the stage of senility.

If, God forbid, it happens someday my only daughter, one of my reasons for living inspiringly, would be included in the statistics of teenage pregnancy, I’d never allow anyone to force her to marry just to “save” herself and her “honor” from becoming a fodder for busybodies and the humor-mongering society. As what I also lately believed, marriage should be sacred. It is something you want to do, not what you have to do. 

It doesn’t mean just because you found yourself forty and above, to catch the so-called “last trip” you’ve to devise an undetectable trap. If you do, you are definitely the one being miserably trapped by the lure of the deceiving world then. Like the young creatures anywhere who are practically still considered children, who think life begins at fourteen. They rush up to marry in churches and courtrooms without much understanding, not knowing how difficult and conflicting married life would be right after the wedding.

Believe in the song “Naaala Ka” by Tito Vic & Joey, during the wedding, plenty of kisses would you shower for each other. But if you observe closely after one year and thereafter, you’d find out there would be only one kiss a year. And worse, strictly for the sake of peace, you’re only doing her a genuine Judas’ Kiss.

As was always repeated by my friend “Lec” who had it personally proven, marriage is not a word but a sentence. 

Considering that since only death could do you part, hence, without a possibility of a parole, it is a life sentence.