Marriage: The Joining of Two Lives

     Growing up, I knew I always wanted to be married. However I did not see the hardships and the teamwork of both my mom and my dad. In my eyes, they were just my parents who I knew loved me. I was too focuses on just the being their child. I do not remember conversations they had about how their marriage was going or how they felt they were leading the family because like I said, I was too busy playing on old Ronald Mcdonald's Childrens Play Place.
     Now having been married, even though not for too long at all I have those conversations with my wife all the time. We will just be sitting at dinner together or we will go out for our date nights and we will have conversations on how we want to raise our family or things we would like to work on to make our marriage stronger. Marriage isn't just you get married, join two lives and there are no issues what so ever. It takes work. It take communication, love, compromise, understanding, compassion, empathy etc. Everyone word you can use to describe teamwork is how marriage is. Joining two lives and making one new life is a glorious thing! Its a hard thing, but a beautiful thing that you cant just say you did it and wont work on it.
      I have thought recently that marriage is like planting a beautiful flower. Yes, this will get a little sappy. However the principle I think is very much applicable. Planting a flower takes a lot of work if you want to to thrive and be beautiful. You have to prep the soil, providing a good environment as well as conditions for planting it. You have to plant the seed in the soil and then after you do that you cannot just leave it to do its thing. Marriage takes careful nourishment and attention. You have to continue to water the flower and provide proper sunlight for growth. You have to pull weeds around the flower so that it will remain healthy, allowing it to thrive more beautifully. There is a lot of work if you plan to be serious in planting and maintaining a beautiful flower. Same goes for a marriage. There are lots of challenges and lots of wonderful memories that contribute to making the flower bloom. I love being married to my wife. It teaches me everyday ways in which I can become a better person. I would not trade it for anything because nothing even comes close to comparing.

Cultural Differences

      I come from a very culturally diverse background. My grandmother on my dads side is actually from Great Britain and my mom is from Lima, Peru. I grew up with a guess you would call the best of both worlds. My dad is very much American however he married my mom, a Hispanic lady. I grew up knowing some of the things that my grandma loved from her country. I'm not sure if James Bond completely counts but I like to think so. I heard Spanish from my mom growing up and began to pick up on the language and learned to communicate with my Grandparents as well as other uncles and aunts. I loved the idea growing up that I has half Hispanic even though I look very American.
      I got to see both sides of life from my dad and my mom. They did an amazing job as I grew up to combine the cultures so that us kids knew where we came from. The one thing that I see now as I look back is neither my mom nor my dad thought the other ones culture was superior or inferior. They looked at each other as equals and respected each others culture. My dad encouraged us to learn about my moms background as well as he taught us about where his family came from. Obviously my parents had no issue with cultural equality because I don't think they would have been married had they had a problem.
      Well fast forward to the now. I am married and I am married to a Hispanic woman. Her family is from El Salvador. Spanish is the primary language for my in laws which is great because it keep my Spanish sharp so I can communicate. Also its been a fun process talking things out with my wife on what different cultural traditions we would like to have our children raised with. I love my wife's family and see them as an equal loving family. Isn't that what the ultimate goal is? To be happy in life. It doesn't matter where you come from. We are all here to reach that same goal. Happiness.

How Do You Know You're In Love?

       This week was very interested in my Family Relations class. I'm truly cherishing the things I have been learning in this class. They have become valuable and eye opening for me. This week I have been extra excited to share this blog post. Being how it is Valentines Day weekend I really wanted to brag and talk up my beautiful wife! My wife's name is Estefani and she truly is my best friend.
       Growing up as a family, we faced some very emotional, spiritual, and difficult trials. It was very hard for me as well as my siblings'. Okay, now jump forward in time. When I met my wife I had one distinct thought, and that was that I had felt like she was the big and special blessing that God had been preparing for me for making it through all the hard trials I faced growing up. Now having had her in my life and knowing what she has done to help me change and become a better person. I would go through that hard trial ten times over and over if I had known that my sweet wife was the one who was waiting at the finished line for me. Now a new race has begun. The race of life that is married and starting our family.
    In class this week we learned about different meanings of love. The first one is Storge which is the kind of affection that you would find between parents and their children. The second one is Philia which is the kind of love that you would find between friends. The third one is Eros. We get erotic from this word which is a kind of sexual love. According to my text book "Aristotle said that eros makes people long to be in each others presence" (Chapter 6, Falling in Love, Marriage and Family The Quest for Intimacy, Page 131.) The fourth kind of love is Agape. This love is the kind of of selfless love, you act for the betterment of another person.
      Now one question you might want to ask yourself is which one makes for the relationship? What kind of love is a lasting love that will carry you through the hard times as well as the good times? In my own opinion I would say that a successful relationship should have all these kinds of love. Why? Because it is a well rounded kind of love to adapt to each kind of experience and or trial that life will throw at you. I guess the trick is to balance each one out in a relationship or perhaps to find out how to even incorporate one. I'm grateful to say that the foundation of my wife and I's relationship has a base of each of these. Now in no way is it perfect. It takes work to balance each one. And it could be very easy to completely neglect one if you are not paying attention. However a thought I had was that each one of these kinds of love grow with experience and a delicate amount of attention you give it. My wife has each one of these. She teaches me so much and she is truly such a gifted person. I feel like my love for her grows everyday. I knew I was in love with her as I got to know her. I got to know how she was as a person. I got to see her in rough situations, happy situations, and loving situations. I think the real answer to know you know in your love based on the kind of person you are.

Gender Roles in my Family

     I wanted to take time to brag about my little sister for this post! She is one of my best friends and our family would NOT be the same without her. She is the only sister in our family and she holds her role in our family very well:) We all love her so much. There is nothing we wouldn't do for her. Honestly, I absolutely love making her laugh. I know I was successful when she laughs at one of my jokes or one of my "older brother acts of stupidity". 
     My sister, brother and I all were raised with the same goal but also differently in some aspects because my brother and I were the boys and our sister was the girl.  Our parents raised us to love and respect one another. We were raised to become good men and to love and support the women in our lives. My sister was raised to be loving and nurturing. She always will be that way. She has helped me in so many ways when I went through my tough times. She was there to help me sort out my stuff. In different times of our lives we would be able to help each other by offering some different part of our personality in order to help the others. We as brothers and my sister really balanced each other out. We were a good team together. We have each others backs even though we play different positions and are coached appropriately.  
      We all played our "role" in the family. We all had our chores to do. We were all expected to do well in school, we were expected to get a job and become self reliant. My sister always held her ground against us brothers. It was kind of a typical sister rule. She didn't like it when we just waltzed into her room and touched her stuff. She takes lots of pride in the decorations in her room. She also expected us to respect her just for that fact that she was our sister and a lady. That was something our dad had instilled in us boys young. We were to respect our sister and our mom. No exceptions. And while sometimes it got in the way of teasing her or giving her a hard time it really carried through our young adult years. Nothing has changed. We still love and respect her. She is the "sister" of our family. And while we had the same expectations from our parents we obviously went about them different way. Even though that was different in our parents raising a daughter versus sons, the goal was the same. To be self reliant, respectable, to love one another and over all to become respectable members of society.