MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE

In an era of 50-percent divorce rates, I wonder how many of those separations are caused by an unwillingness on one or more parties to give and take, to compromise, and how many of these are simply the result of bad choices and decisions.
Take, for instance, the woman who was truly in love with one man but then got a little too possessive and lost him. In an effort to win him back, she tried to make him jealous and wound up marrying the rebound relationship she began, even though she knew she did not love this second man.
Or the woman who was infatuated or in love -- it depends on whom you ask -- with a guy her sister was dating. Eventually the sister and the guy break up, but not before this woman gets pregnant with another guy she was dating at the time and winds up married to him.
Or consider the guy who naively believes that, well, he's supposed to be married by a certain age. After years of being unable to even land a date, he falls into a relationship with a woman. It is his first relationship and yet he thinks this must be it, so he marries her, even though he gets a barrage of signals warning him that this relationship just isn't right. For him, though, time and a sense of requirement -- as in, "this is what you are supposed to do next" -- are of the essence, so he acts against his own better judgment.
Or consider the woman who, walled off from a potentially loving relationship by a possessive and controlling boyfriend, weds the same boyfriend because at the time safety and security weighed more heavily on her mind than the need for love, in large part because this boyfriend kept love from her. As they say, however, where there is a marriage without love, there will be love without a marriage. And in her case, she found love years later.
While economics and changes in society have allowed more people the freedom to wait longer for the right person to come along, I think we still make mistakes at least half of the time. But where previous generations simply endured the mistakes they made, we now have the liberty to end what is wrong and continue to search for what is right.
That does not mean the search is ever easy. I truly believe there is one person on this planet for whom we were made, that one perfect match we were born to love. When we meet this person we will know it beyond a shadow of even the slimmest doubt, making us realize just how precious and rare this discovery is.
That said, there still are people in the world whom we could love, at least to a degree; people who are not the one, not our soulmate, not our perfect match. We might wind up with one of them if we have not the patience to keep looking or the willingness to trust that, yes, out there somewhere in the world is the person who is absolutely right for me. These other people would not be complete mismatches or totally imperfect for us, but in settling for them we could miss out on the most incredible and most important experience of our lives.
And we might well wind up being in the wrong 50 percent of couples today.