Love & Marriage

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

When I was young, 18 to be exact, two of my coworkers and I visited one of my coworker's mother. A very few minutes after I got introduced to her mother who looked me over, her mother offered me a proposition. She offered me $10,000 in cash if I marry her granddaughter who was still in the Philippines and bring her here to America.

I didn't know what to say. But she pressed on. And I was left just thinking. I knew her granddaughter must be pretty because my married coworker and her mother were pretty. After what seemed like forever, though actually less than a minute, my coworker interrupted her mother and said something like I will think it over.

Had I told my father about this, I believed he would have told me to say yes. Because $10,000 was a lot of money to him.

But I was in a quandary. I have some sort of feeling for my other coworker. They were my first friends on the job when I got my first real full time job at 17. The three of us would go out together in my married coworker's car.

I even met her retired military husband whom she met back in the Philippines and her young daughter, in her house. We were like "The Three Musketeers", inseparable. She even introduced my father to horse racing because she was so worldly and my father was so homely. I admired her, and as for my other coworker, I adored her.

But I was naive back then. I didn't know what was good for me and what was bad. But mostly, I didn't know what to do. So after graduating from college, rather than confronting what I am feeling for my coworker, I enlisted in the army at 20 rather than confront my cowardice.

I left a good job, my good friends, my new car, all my worldly goods to my parents and many siblings to face a whole new adventure called the United States Army. But that's another story, and as I said I didn't know what was good for me back then.

I know some reader may still be thinking about that $10,000 proposition. What if you were offered that proposition? Had I known back then what true love is, I would have given the proposition serious consideration. That would have solve my marrying anymore. Because true love is hard to find.

Less than 5% of all people will say they found true love. And if you find it, your true love may not love you back. In fact arranged marriages is more desirable. Your parents will find you your wife or husband. No need for you to go on dating and hoping and looking and repeating the same process again and again. Just let your parents decide who to marry. And as I say, most people will never know true love. What is true love, anyway?

What is true love? True love is when a wooden plank can only hold one person and you choose your true love to be on it and you just holding on to it as you freeze in the cold ocean. Just like Leonardo in the movie "Titanic." True love is when you'd rather stay in the Titanic with your true love rather than go in a lifeboat. That's what true love is. True love is about being noble.

But true love has gone away these days along with the British nobility. There are no more British earls and viscounts, or barons or baronets, who hold large estates like they used to. All these noblemen have become no more than commoners. True love will only be experienced by a few, those of noble hearts who long for noble deeds.

Ever so faithful and true,

John Sindayen