Lifebond

Long car rides definitely lend themselves to thought. On the way down to the beach, I got to thinking about the movie Love Actually and all the different types of love in it. And it struck me that my parents have been married for 20 years. 20 years of such close proximity that they have only spent more than a month apart once, and that was this year. They were dating before that too, so maybe 22 or 23 years. Whew! That is an awfully long time. What sort of bond would make that length and amount of proximity desirable? (No, I'm not really asking that question... more like wondering about the nature of it) I mean, I've known my sister pretty much our whole life, and we don't have to be in eachother's lives even half as much as my parents seem to want to be. You always hear about love, and how it's so strong... in fact, it's so strong that in several ways it's taken over our culture's imagination. But... well, I don't think that pop culture covers the half of it. When Harry says to Sally that "when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible", you (or at least, I) don't really think about the strength of bond (for lack of a better word) that must go with that desire. Watching things like The Swan Princess as kids or The Bachelorette, for some of you reality TV fans, you don't think twice about the commitment that these people/characters are making without really knowing what they're getting into. I know that if I spend too much time with a lot of people, we end up fighting; getting "sick of eachother" as it were. Is that, maybe, why old couples and married couples quarrel? Because they know so much about one another and spend so much time in eachother's company that they learn intricately one another's foibles?
I do know one thing. I can't imagine myself having that sort of bond. I can't even imagine... I will say this: thanks Deece, for getting me started thinking about my parents as an example of love. You posted in some post or other that you were amazed at and thankful for your parent's example- so I looked at mine to see how they got along.