Love and marriage don't go together like horse and carriage

We often forget that the celebrated Romeo and Juliet were teenagers who were madly in love, and died in their teens.  Had their feuding Capulets and the Montagues blessed the young love, the two would have gotten married.  If that had happened, not only will there be no story of Romeo and Juliet, chances are also that Romeo and Juliet would not have had a happy life ever after.

It is not that I am pessimistic about teenage love.  Au contraire!  It is simply that daily life sucks away all those glorious emotions that made Romeo and Juliet.  Such is the life that we humans live.

The men and women of literature help us understand this human condition.  Gabriel García Márquez is simply masterful in Love in the time of cholera when he presents the complex emotions that make us who we are.  Through one of his characters, he writes about matrimony:

an absurd invention that could exist only by the infinite grace of God. It was against all scientific reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with no ties at all between them, with different characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddenly find themselves committed to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions. He would say: "The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast."

Perhaps every teenager in love, every young bridge and groom, thinks that theirs is the true love that would defy all odds and past human experience and would last forever.  Maybe we need such optimism among the young; if not, humanity has no future.

What every starry-eyed couple find out sooner than later is that the routines of everyday existence can seem boring after a while to most people.  Life can be Groundhog Day over and over again.  Marquez writes that "the problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom."

I am pretty sure that Romeo and Juliet had no idea about the boredom of everyday life, and how life--married or single--"must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast."  Perhaps they lucked out not knowing that life is a procession of “frustrations and irritations.”