Choosing a life partner isn't easy

Last week I wrote about all the forks in the road we face in living our lives and all the choices we have to make when we get to those forks, not knowing ahead of time which will be good choices and which will be bad ones. Finding a life partner is another fork in the road because we have so many to choose from.

I've dated a lot of girls since my first date with Toni Marple in the 9th grade in Atkins, Arkansas , the home of the Red Devils. I dated Toni through the 11th grade and all of our friends were certain we would get married. But we didn't.

Since her I've dated many other girls. Literally hundreds of girls. All different kinds of girls. Some were one night flings. Some were mistakes. Some I really liked. And some I loved. But living in a monogamous society like America dictates that you can have only one at a time and, for many people, only one in a lifetime so we have to decide who that one is going to be.

It's a daunting task. To begin with, your chances for failure are high. Over half the marriages in this country end in divorce and the experts claim that on the day you say I do, you only have a one in four chance of having a long-term, happy marriage. So marriages aren't made in heaven. God doesn't make that many mistakes and if he did, he wouldn't be a God. Those mistakes are ours, even though we don't see them as mistakes when we make them.

That's another parallel to the fork in the road. Yogi Berra, the famous philosopher and catcher for the New York Yankees once said when you get to a fork in the road, take it. But we have to decide which fork to take and we often choose wrong. We can only predict the future from things we are feeling and that are occurring in the present and both those things are constantly changing. Sometimes the relationship gets better with time but just as often, it gets worse. If things ARE going to get worse, there are almost always danger signs we should pay attention to but most of us don't because we don't want anything to interfere with our dreams.

What started out as a good decision for me ended up bad 25 years later because my wife and I drifted apart. When I accepted the job at McCook Community College, she chose to stay in Arkansas and continue teaching instead of coming to Nebraska with me. We tried to make the best of it for a couple of years but I eventually met and fell in love with a woman named Deb. That ended my marriage because I picked her over my wife but ultimately, she didn't pick me.

I don't know how that happens. I don't know how we fall out of love with one person and in love with another person. Certainly there has to be some chemistry between two people who fall in love. Surely there has to be a mutual attraction, what many call sex appeal or sexual desire. It makes sense that in addition to being in love with each other that they should like each other too. And that means they would rather be with that person than anyone else in the world. These are the kinds of emotions I go through when I'm in love but I don't know if they're the same for other people. Maybe others have different priorities than me or different interests, or things that are more important to them. I just know I've always trusted those people I've fallen in love with to be honest with me and tell me the truth and I've been disappointed several times because they couldn't do that.

We know some people choose their spouses out of dread or fear or desperation instead of love. We know that some pick a mate for all the wrong reasons and then stay with that person in spite of their failings.

Almost every person in America will reach a fork in the road where they will choose a life partner. Some will choose well and some won't.

It's always been that way and it always will be!