Of love, proposal, cheating, and heartache

As I was browsing my LJ friends' page earlier, I came across my friend's post about proposal. She said her girlfriend proposed to her and she doesn't know what to do. I told her to accept, if she loves the girlfriend enough. She said she does love her girlfriend, but - and this is a big, big but - the woman cheated on her after she proposed. With a guy.

It got me thinking. What do people really think about love? I'm not talking about platonic, friend to friend love here, I'm talking about love between a person and another person, regardless of the genders. It seems that it is very easy nowadays for people to say the three magic words. If people don't really mean it, why do they have to say it so often? Has the phrase "I love you" become very cheap these days?

And do people really propose so easily these days? I mean, WOW! Proposing to the one you love is one big decision. When you say it, it means you are ready to spend your life with the person - the rest of your life. But I see that more and more people get married after only a few months of relationship, and I see that most of them end up in a divorce not long after. Look at this statistics. This is insane!

Marriage for me is forever. When you 'tie' yourself to a person, it is for until one of you leaves the earth. That means no matter what happens between you in the future, you stick to your vow. There may be some time when you ask yourself what you are doing with the person you marry; there may be some time when you think you made a mistake of getting married; there may be this time when you see someone else, someone 'better' than your spouse and you begin to wonder and regret your decision. Still, I think it is not a reason to cheat.

Some people may not realize it, but the pain of being cheated on will not go away that easily. And if you think that pain is the only thing it caused, you are wrong. There will always this feeling of being inadequate, of being not good enough. And the feelings are worse than pain - you carry them all the way. Even when they get into a new relationship, the insecurity will always lurk behind. And guess what, the insecurity will be one of the reasons of another broken relationship. A vicious, never-ending cycle, isn't it?