Day 89: Why we fight for love

I've just watched Revolutionary Road, an unsettling film about marriage and selfishness.  When a particular scene from a film strikes me, it snaps- like a picture in my mind-and holds as a still image.  And so I have this frame of a husband and wife fighting.  His face is literally bulging, the veins popping out the sides of his head with hands clenched and knuckled.  Her hair is everywhere- just a crazy blond mess and she's got a smoldering cigarette in one hand with wide crazy eyes as she yells at him to just shut up for five minutes. 
I wonder what in the world are they fighting for.  Can this be love?
 
I always thought that fighting for a marriage was a sort of boxing match that couple's squared off in.  I imagined raised voices and flying dishclothes.  This conflict, I thought, was a sign of life.  And for the first year of our marriage I tried to mimick this sort of full-contact love.  I remember the first time I whipped a dishtowel at Rich.  We were fighting and yelling and I was getting so worked up, I don't even remember what it was about.  I grabbed the closet soft object, a dish towel and balled it up and hurled it at my husband.  It's not really possible to hurl a dishcloth, so it rather landed with a soft thunk on his shoulder.  I expected him to laugh at me or throw it back or come over and kiss me good.  But he just looked at me like I was some kind of stranger, then turned and walked away. 

I know now that I've got it all wrong.  Fighting for your marriage isn't a fight against your partner, it's a fight against your own self.  It's the conflict of my own desires against the truth of what we need, together.  Fighting for love is  sacrifice.  It doesn't have to be loud or angry.  But it has to be real, and I think it has to be a bit uncomfortable.  Fighting for love is a risky battle, as we allow pieces of ourselves to fall away- to matter less and less.  But we fight for our marriages, we fight for love, because it's the only fight where everyone wins.  And because in losing ourselves we find so much more in each other.