I still remember the words my teacher told me in high school.
"Whether you can get married or not depends on whether you can hold that person's poop in your hands."
It's truly ridiculous. Yet, while I've forgotten almost every other story I was told, I've somehow remembered this one sentence for a long time.
Recently, I feel like I've started to understand the reason why. Marriage is not about thinking about who you want to be with.
Can you hold that person's poop? It might be a gross topic, but when you think about living with someone for a long time, I feel like it hits the core of the matter.
While you are dating, there is time you can choose between yourself and your partner. You meet on days you want to meet, and stay alone on days you don't. If you're in a bad mood, you don't have to reply, and if you're feeling unwell, you can meet after you've slept. You can choose, to some extent, which version of yourself to show the other person.
However, once you start living together, those options gradually disappear. Even on days you come home exhausted, you are in the same house, and even on days you don't want to say a word, if the other person wants to talk, you have to listen.
As the time spent living together grows longer, you spend more time with the parts of that person that you don't necessarily like, but which are simply part of who they are, rather than the parts you needed to fall in love with them in the first place.
There's no guarantee you can live based solely on the reasons you first fell in love decades after getting married. Appearances change, and personalities change according to life stages. In other words, when you marry, you don't continue living with the person you fell in love with. You end up living over and over again with a partner you didn't yet know when you first fell in love.
Each time that happens, can you still feel like you want to be with this person?
The longer you are together, the larger the proportion of days becomes where the emotion of "love" is useless. Even on days when you are angry and honestly have no room to be kind, you still have to lend a hand if the other person is in trouble. By overcoming these kinds of days many times, the relationship becomes something different from romance.
I used to think marriage required being able to love this person forever, but now I think it's more important to be able to cherish them even on days when you can't love them.
Love is an emotion that happens inside you, but "cherishing" is an action, so you must choose it yourself. Can you swallow the words you don't need to say on a day you're angry? Can you still listen to the other person once on a day you find it tedious? After living together for years, it's these kinds of days that define the relationship.
Up until now, I've only thought about holding the other person's poop, but there is an opposite side.
A day may come when someone has to hold your poop. It's fine if you're always healthy and can support your partner, but the unpleasant part is when you become the one being supported.
The day will come when you can no longer do what you used to do alone and must ask someone to take care of you. That means showing the person you love the version of yourself you least want them to see. I believe marriage includes the resolve to be accepted by your partner just as much as the resolve to accept them.
When I think that far, my teacher's words sound different. A partner you can marry isn't so much someone you love intensely, but someone with whom you don't have to hide the fact that you are both human.
Of course, I wasn't thinking about any of that when I was a high school student. Yet, decades later, when I think about marriage, that one sentence comes to mind.
"Can you hold that person's poop in your hands?"
The expression might be vulgar, but I think it was a phrase that instantly reached a place that stories about "falling in love" cannot reach.
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