by Ann Stewart Porter

Created on: May 16, 2010

"Here's the list."  The man handed me a list with all the personality differences he and his wife of twenty years shared. I was expecting some heavy details. If it had not have been so serious, I would have laughted out loud! She doesn't smile in the morning. He does. You would think I was making it up, but I just sat there thinking how terribly sad this had become.

I was sad someone had not loved this man enough to know how good this marriage could be. His wife had given up years ago. About that same time, a woman told me her husand had just married another woman out of revenge. He wants her back and she doesn't know what to do.

Marriage is complicated, they say. I suspect that is because people are complicated or simple, and  usually both. So many people get married with some feeling attached and can't figure out how to keep the feeling alive. Some people have never really come to terms with who they are or what they want or why they want it.

Humans being who they are, will often find themselves making strange decisions from out of something deep inside they do not understand. I remember discussing teenage pregnancies in school years ago.

A girl was on her third child, unwed and tax heavy, she tried to argue she didn't know better. Another teenager handed her a pamphlet from the pile that covered almost every classroom.

"Yes, you know better" she said to the girl. We all knew she knew that sexual contact could result in a child, yet she was unwilling to admit her part in the issue. What's so complicated about that?

What's complicated about choosing to cheat on a relationship? What's so tough about building a life with a person you love? What becomes of people who said I do, but don't?  We act like we don't know, but we know.

We are human beings. We fall, we fail, we crash and burn. We don't like to think we do, but we do. We like to think if we are Donald Trump successful, we don't have the capacity to keep relationships at home finely tuned, yet ironically, we still place our bets on the table to be both.

We want it all. We want it now. We want to live like we were dying when we are trying so hard to live. Life is easier than it has ever been and I am among the ones still saying life if hard.

We have more to tickle our fancy than in the history of the world and we are making movies called 'The world is not enough'...how true that is for so many of us.

Marriages fail for all the reasons people fail at anything they do. Marriage, like many

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