Upon the Altar of commitment...

How much are you willing to sacrifice for love?

If you knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, this person was the one for you, the one that moves your whole universe, the one who brings sunshine with a smile, if you knew that that person would be the one you could merge your soul to for the rest of your life...what would you sacrifice?

Would you accept minor annoyances? A lover that was decidedly unfashionable? Extra long hairs coming out of an ear? A woman with a moustache? A man with breasts?

Would you accept emotional distance? Knowing your lover will not come to you when you call them? Knowing that in times of need they may pull away from you and seek their comfort with someone else?

Would you accept physical distance, left behind while your beloved is away for school or for a summer study program? Could you accept them being discharged in the military, them relocating for work, them spending a summer in the Incan ruins and not with you?

Would you accept pain? Would you accept a partner who is emotionally abusive, someone who is cold to you because they can be, a person who does not honor your company in the same way you honor theirs?

Would you accept physical abuse, trading bruises, scrapes, slaps, and broken bones for whispers of tenderness and declarations of affection?

It is very easy to sit and read and think and rationalize with your mind exactly how you want to experience love. You think to yourself that there are clear lines and boundaries. That your lover would never intentionally hurt you. That your lover would never manipulate or abuse you. You begin to fantasize. Your lover would instinctively know how you feel in every given situation, and dispense just the right medicine to heal what ails. Your lover is aware of everything that pleases you, and brings you sweet tokens of their affection.

You also fantasize about yourself - that you would be the best lover humanly possible to them; that they would never lust for anyone else, long for someone else, because you would be everything to them. The idea isn't necessarily to be that person's only experience in love and lust, but to be chosen. It is not to delete what came before - it is simply the desire to be the last. The one and only. The chosen.

But, as Shakespeare so eloquently put, "The course of true love never did run smooth."

More often than not, your lover does not understand how to make you completely happy. How to please you in every single way.

Or perhaps, they do understand, but choose not to compromise what they want in order to make you happier.

That is the most painful reality to face - explaining what will make you happy and having the other person disregard what you say, or willfully refuse to acquiesce to your wishes. So you compromise. You adapt to what your partner is willing to do to make you happy, and find a way to reconcille the rest in your mind.

But how much of that is something that should be compromised? What if you end up sacrificing a key part of yourself to make someone else happy? Or if you had done exactly that in the past, which has made you resistant to sacrificing any part of yourself again, for any reason.

Upon the altar of commitment, how much are you willing to sacrifice in order to get exactly what you want?