I'm curious

"It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love."

I've been thinking a lot lately about love. More accurately, I think about love all the time, in many different forms, and probably believe it is the ultimate most important thing to me, to everyone. But I've been thinking about the marriage kind of love. A little late to the game, perhaps, because I've always in my head wanted marriage - yet kept acting in ways that would prove otherwise.

A co-worker of mine said to me plainly, you need to be friends. It's obvious and I think most people would agree - but mentally and emotionally it has been personally difficult to comprehend fully what this means. She said to me that she falls in and out of love all the time - one week I can't stand him, and the next I'm in love. She is a no-bullshit kind of person, so she's not being whimsical - she's being utterly honest. Being that close to one person for decades makes everything so intimate on a level no where near anything I have ever experienced.

What brings my wandering mind to this? Nothing more but current relationships I'm navigating through. The love that I have been in thus far in my life has been strong, because I love deeply and fervently. No one that I choose to be in my life will lack understanding that I want them there (as long as I don't fumble over my own words and emotions). But the strongest ones have fallen away for one reason or another - and it makes me wonder. I wonder about my own standards, the ways in which my heart opens to people, and how people choose people.  It's clear that certain people are drawn to each other, for various reasons. But why do we have these people that we have a connection with, but we cannot have the type of relationship with that we might want? All the songs and movies that equate love to a passionate drug, being in chains, the overindulgence of eating too much cake. Our emotions. How does it become real?

Some people think everything happens for a reason: 'bad' things are preparations for future experiences. That A happened, so that B could happen. I live more like: B happened because A happened. All this blubber comes down to this point - people are just people. Sometimes I don't get it, or sometimes they don't. Something I have is everything they need at that time in their life, or the opposite. The thing that I keep coming back to is everything is a choice.

What I mean to say is, I've found someone who is easy to be with. We are learning about each other. It is different than the others. It isn't frantic, immature. It is new, simple. I'm curious.