Ashleigh of Heart & Home on marriage

[silvia]

ashleighbaker.net/2011/08/choosing-the-ring/

Sooo... what do you all think happened here? My guess is some kind of infidelity; that would probably be the one thing that would prompt Ashleigh to consider divorce. She did marry very young -- in her teens, if I remember correctly.

[browngrl]

It is hard to say with this one. She seems really young still and prone to the dramatic and her husband was deployed for quite some time. So who knows - maybe it's her just being her or may be the separation was the problem or maybe he/she cheated while separated?

[Austin]

I wouldn't disagree with her that love is a choice. On some level, I do choose to love my husband (not just in the way I feel, but by my actions) and he chooses to love me. When a marriage becomes a decades-long affair, there are bound to be lots of days in those decades where one or the other or both didn't feel particularly in love, or maybe didn't even like the other person that much at that particular point in time. So it is our commitment to love sometimes more than the actual love itself that carries us through those occasions.

But I would argue to the blogger that there are times when love is the wrong choice. She claims to have made the right choice by sticking out a difficult time in her marriage, and I have no reason to doubt that it was the right choice for her. But it isn't the right choice for everybody. A lot of people shouldn't be married to each other. Their union and the continuation of it causes pain and long-lasting damage, for themselves and for any children of the marriage. For them, the right choice may very well be (and should be) to slip that ring off for good.