What Are Your Whys to Marriage

(Apologies if my dyslexia comes through in my true story)

Why marry someone? Statistically marriage fails, but people continue to do it anyway.

Here's my #1 to get married, because life is not personal. It's just lonely by yourself, but fucking harder with someone else who is trying to live a fairytale of what love and marriage are.

In 2008 I married my girlfriend at our local courthouse and ended up eating our wedding dinner at Burger King.

We both had come from failed long term relationships and had kids with our ex.

Our relationship started with a strong friendship for each other, not your usual lust for each other. But it still resulted with us having a child together in less than two years together.

But we were pretty happy to have a child together and when Bella was born in 2007 it was such an amazing feeling to have a child with someone who understands who you are and shares the same values as you do. Now, the values I'm talking about are suffering from our previous long term relationships of heartache.

But months after Bella's birth, tragedy shuck that resulted in our daughter dying due to a systemic error from the hospital that cost Bella her life.

The ripple effect was instant in a short time, and the usual effects of what life can be like in the western world when you don't have support and family suck, and it's harder to overcome tragedy. So, we became homeless, our business went under, all because I chose not to care anymore about myself or anything or anyone else. The day Bella died, a huge part of who I was died as well.

Now I already came from shit in my upbringing and had tremendous resilience in myself. My wife came from a good upbringing, but still ended up in a domestic violence relationship trying to find love, but to her credit she had developed good resilience from choosing to suffer in that relationship, even after four kids.

This was one of my first whys, to why I loved her. Because instead of letting her abuse define her, she choose not to be a survivor or a victim, she choose to be something better, accountable.

Now when you value someone, even your children more than you value yourself, then you are going to strike trouble mentally within your future.

I always value my children more than I value myself. My family taught me that by caring more about themselves than me, so I was use to always struggling alone, but trying to be positive.

Now when life shits on you, it's not personal, it's just life, so as you continue to breathe and think you are owed something different because of what you have experienced in life. That becomes an expectation of love, but the news wasn't great for the two of us for being able to have another child. We were actually given less than 10% chance of our baby surviving if we ever got pregnant, again.

But we decided to try anyway, after the first three miscarriage in 2008, my girl said to me, "I don't think we are going to make it."

She said to me, "I have been doing research and in NZ only 3% of couples that lose a child make it and stay together."

I responded to her by saying, "That's easy then, all we have to do is fit in the 3%."

She looks at me with shock and says to me, "I never thought about it that way."

But I decided to marry my girlfriend to make her have a sense of ownership over me. So off to the courthouse we went, with our teenager kids as our only witnesses, and I married her on November 20th, 2008.

As the years started to roll by, we enjoyed each other, as well as continued to fail with trying to have another baby.

All our kids started to finish school and life just kept moving, and we were now at 10 miscarriages and seven years had passed since Bella death.

But we kept going and finally after eight years, on the 2nd of July 2015, our son, Justyce was born.

A year later I was self-reflecting at my journey in life and I thought to myself how lucky am I to have this great woman, who has suffered so much in trying for us to have this child together, that we both wanted so bad. Not to replace our beautiful daughter, but giving the journey of life and love a purpose to create an opportunity to offer the world something purer of a human being created from pain and suffering, instead of the illusion that our child was created of nothing but love and happiness.

I had discovered that love is not the lust of attraction when you first meet, but love is something that you create from failing with someone but are grateful for who they are and why they still want to try and keep going. And if anyone deserves a great wedding and a fairytale, it's this girl.

So I decided to give her a proper wedding and asked her to remarry me on what would have been our daughter Bella's 10th birthday.

So on the March 29th, 2017, I remarried my wife in front of all our friends and family in the mountains, in our homeland of New Zealand.

The photo above always blows my mind, our youngest son kissing his mother as she's about to walk down the aisle.

This picture is the story of our love and devotion to each other, to not allow anyone else define our relationship with each other, but a reflection of love as an action of purpose to achieve the unachievable, by trying to achieve anyway.

This is what marriage is, it's just not about all the good stuff, it's about all the bad stuff as well.

When you learn to love someone else because you both know how to suffer together, but choose to make the best out of the situation from the cards life has dealt you, you learn how to be authentic and happy with each other and create true love. And this kind of love is not given, it's created out of pain and suffering, to be self-aware of when and how to enjoy joy and pleasure from each other, this is what true love looks and feels like and what marriage is about. Not the answers, but the questions we ask ourselves every day. Why do you love me? And if there is no action of love towards that, why then all that person is saying is nothing more than a word? Love is always an action with a purpose to understand why you love anything or anyone.