Soap Box Session-Marriage

I had not planned on writing anything today. My morning run was uneventful and my day was filled with travel and work, but then I read the news online that Ruth Graham, wife of Billy Graham, had passed.
When I first saw the headline of her failing conditions last night, I accepted it with the same detached interest as I, like most Americans, do any other story. That changed this evening.
As I began reading the story, I was moved, yes I'll admit, to tears. To read of her devotion to her husband during his years of evangelism and travel. To hear that despite Billy being a Baptist minister, she maintained her own devotion to the Presbyterian denomination in which she was brought up. Impressed by the fact that while loving and supportive of her husband, she was also a woman who held firm to her own convictions, I thought of some other couples I know.
A quick look around at my friends, my acquaintances, and my co-workers, would reveal a number of marriages failed or failing. I'm no expert on relationships, I've botched my fair share, but the common denominator in the relationships I've seen fail is a notion that marriage means giving up who you are and what you want, to become the person that your spouse wants you to be.
From this misguided notion comes the following; 1) People leave a marriage to have more freedom to be their own person, 2) People spend so much time trying to be who they think their spouse wants them to be, they quit being the person their spouse fell in love with, 3) They trudge through life and relationships, never finding joy and satisfaction in a loving relationship.
When I finished reading the article, my eyes filled with tears as I realized that Billy Graham would now live out his days without his biggest supporter, his closest friend, and his trusted confident. I couldn't help but think of my own marriage, and the blessing from God that is my wife. I thought of how it would feel to face tomorrow without her? The sick feeling in the pit of my stomach warned me to not dwell on that question for too deeply or for too long.
I couldn't help but wonder, "What if my friends and aquaintances saw their marriages as a gift from God, not as an inconvenience?" "What if they recognized that to be a couple, doesn't mean giving up on your dreams or letting go of who you are, rather it is about supporting one another in the pursuit of those dreams?" "Don't they know that on somedays you walk your path, on other days you follow your spouse's, but that always you walk together and in doing so your journey is completed."