Keep the faith.

When i was in the Tenth Standard, a certain psychologist lady had come to school and given us a talk on sex education, marriage, the works. In the process of talking about the second, she'd asked each of us what we thought we wanted in a guy.

Some said, he should be fun, some that he should be good-looking and all. I remember telling her that he should be understanding. She seemed pretty impressed by my answer - who sees such wisdom in one so young? (Pat pat Nabila). I was pretty impressed as well, and my answer still stays the same. But there's something else that's gained as much importance in my Guide To Finding The Right Man - faithfulness. Not the kind that's shown by a dog, but the kind that shows through when one person loves another.

Think about it, why was it that in our parents' days, loyalty to a partner was never a problem? Why is it that more than 95% of the marriages, arranged or otherwise, worked without a third person to hold it together? What is it about our generation, and more specifically, our society, that sees so many indiscretions?

I watched 'Breaking and Entering' the other day. As an aside, i don't particularly like Jude Law but there was something about him in this movie that really got me. Was it the fact that he was an infidel? Maybe. What really got me, though, is that maybe sometimes for marriages to work, an extra-marital affair is a necessity. Almost like you love someone, you get married, life takes over the romance which starts being taken for granted, and then you have an affair because it brings back the excitement and love and lust. Come decision time, you have to choose between the new-found love and the taken-for-granted love. Except that it's no longer taken for granted. Somewhere in the middle of the affair you realise that you're so comfortable with the person you already have, that that person is somehow so much better, you've already given it the best years of your life; and so you give up your affair, reinvesting all your energy in making the relationship you already have work. What's left is a big question mark in the form of a love-lorn woman/man. Is it worth all the heartache?

In the movie, it is. Because Jude Law and his wife get back into their married life with renewed vigour and love, the way it was (by implication) before they were married. And it's not all sad for Juliet Binoche, the other woman: there is a bond, an understanding between them, a strong dose of love as well, but not one that's strong enough to overcome their respective priorities - in his case the marriage and in hers, her son who gets convicted for felony.

The movie, to me, in so many ways summarised the story of most of our lives in this day and age - the marriage reaching a stagnant point with no joy for either party involved, pent-up feelings that need a vent and find it in somebody else's embrace and bed; the difficulty of making the decision to choose what you already have over what you could have had; the half-ease, half-pain with which the lovers walk away from each other to pick up their lives where they had left them off; the heartbreak, the truths, the sacrifices; the residual love, or what resembles it anyway. An act of faithlessness that only brings back the faith with full force, all quite peachy-keen actually.

So yes, i do understand this side of the coin (or should i say, bed?). But am i ready for faithlessness in my relationships or my marriage?

No. I'm not. My heart's not big enough for that.