Commitment

I saw a wedding today. It was a nice, gray day in Singapore and the party was taking photos outside with a beautiful view of the Fullerton Hotel and a river at their backside. The bride was dressed in a metallic-black gown. Her maids wore metallic-white. The couple was young. Perhaps 26 at most. While the girls had their photos taken, the groom sat hunched over a park bench, spewing out a fountain of brown chards and liquids.
At a glance, it was quite the unconventional wedding: a bride in black, a groom sick before the first dance. All this foreshadowing the most conventional of all acts: a ceremony to seal a deal for a life-time. Not even parents make this promise to their children.
The irony of this picture strikes me as the real deal of marriage. Namely, the puke. The dark.
But, as I walk away and take a last look a the bride now posing in all her glory on a bridge over water, not waiting for her husband to strike a pose I am forced to think of small words I have just recently read: that the true irony of commitment is that it is deeply liberating, in work, love, and play. It frees you from yourself.

Maybe then the black and the puke are just what we are able to express when we commit... .