Spending a forever with anyone is a gift.  Trying and arduous and tortuous and obscenely beautiful.

I see couples daily who waddle in together at ninety.  Who laugh at one another's hypochondria.  Who fill in the missing pieces of confused and dawdling medical histories.  Who hold one another's hands during procedures which seem so foreign and terrifying and confusing.

The intimacy of several decades is irreplaceable.  Astounding.  But truly a test of endurance. Dedication.  Commitment.

I used to be under the impression--and continue to be, on the odd Tuesday--that commitment makes things dull.  That some of the shine of life erodes with days and days stacked one upon the other with the same face, the same hands, the same sex.

And yet, perhaps, I judge too harshly.  Too quickly.  Perhaps the real art is the making of something lovely over the course of many monotonous days.  Of looking at the one you have chosen and consciously loving them every single day for as long as you both live.  In laughing as bodily functions become intimate and inside jokes become so layered that one intermingles with the others in a perfectly seamless manner.

Perhaps the true test, in the end, is not of unconscious and tortured dedication but of creativity.  Of waking each day to a new nuance of a partner's humor, a new gray hair, a new song that speaks to you both on such a deep level that you play it on EVERY juke box in every bar you happen to wander into in any midwestern city on any day.

Perhaps the beauty, as with so many other things, is in the choice.  Is in the finite, inordinately stunning moments of utter mundanity that, somehow, become rich because of the human beside you.