Marriage as a spiritual path means committing to loving one another as you really are not as you had imagined or wanted each other to be. It means committing to accepting and loving yourselves even when the pettiest and most immature parts of your beings emerge in protest at life not going as planned.

It is not the lack of fulfillment of our heart's yearnings that leads to hopelessness, but rather the attempts to protect ourselves from our passion and our heartbreak. Far from not caring about our life, the life we yearn for is so precious that we would often rather suffer in hopelessness than risk the possibility of failing.