What people think of love and marriage seem to be quit different from person to person. It's something that we all will experience at one point in our lives and you would figure that we would have a pretty good grasp on what it means. But the truth is, now a days we all have our own views and opinions of how it’s supposed to be done. Some of us prefer a good old classic approach, and some of us like to take it a little more liberally. I guess you can’t say that there is really a right or a wrong way to do it. However, I think if we take a few steps back we can get a better perspective on it in our current day in age.

The whole idea of marriage is something that was brought up by religion in the first place. By definition, the bible says that the term marriage is reserved for the pairing of a man and a woman for life. Now, in no way am I against gay marriage but I can see why some people may be offended by it. As soon as we change what marriage has been defined to be, we are changing something that goes back way further than us.

So I don’t like to use the term marriage. I think that it has a lot of loaded meaning behind it that most people don’t think about. So I look at marriage like a partnership. When two people come together, bonding with love, they form a partnership.

Looking at the bonding of love as a partnership rather than using the term “marriage” makes sense. Now a days most millennials see marriage as a way for anyone of any gender and sex to legally tie the knot. So instead of trying to redefine what marriage has meant for thousands of years, lets just use another word that represents it better, like partnership.

Now if we use the term partnership, it opens up a whole new freedom to how we can love each other. A partnership can be between and man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, or a queer and a queer (Queer, meaning any position on the gender scale that doesn’t fall between the usual gender binary). Partnership also isn’t limited to just two people. Two or more people could be joined together in a partnership. My point is, that there aren’t any rules that can tell us how we can love. Whatever makes us happy and whatever we think is right we should be able to do in terms of our relationships.

Now lets take a look at love. Love is a feeling that we all will hopefully feel in our lives. It’s an intense divine force that pushes us towards one another. Looking at love at an evolutionary standpoint, it’s probably a feeling that we have evolved to have. I think of love as a consequence of natural selection. The people that tended to be drawn towards each other to form a partnership survived, and furthermore reproduced to continue their gene pool. What we’re left with is an uncontrollable instinct that draws us towards another person.

Looking at love today, it’s a lot different-- in that we don’t need each other to survive. With the growing equality of all sexes and genders we can really make it out there on our own. But what do we do now since we still have this instinct of love? Other than that we still need the instinct to reproduce, love can be a limitation to our lifestyle. We constantly make sacrifices to make ourselves more attractive or make sacrifices to maintain a relationship. Now I’m not saying that this is always a bad thing but I think we sometimes make too many sacrifices that inhibit our lifestyle.

So since our instinct of love isn’t going anywhere we better learn how to deal with it so that it fertilizes our lives rather than limit them. We all know the power couple out there that we make as our relationship goals, traveling, loving, and laughing (Jay Alvarez and Alexis Ren). But we also know those bad couples out there that everyone else sees as bad for each other but they're so blinded by their own love that they can't seem to get passed it.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of love. It makes us feel like we should hang on to it because we might not get another chance at it. We put up with a lot of things that, if we looked at it logically, would make no sense. I think that people are too afraid to admit that they’ve been wasting their time with someone who they’ve fallen in love with. So they just try to make the best out of what they’ve got when sometimes its just better to admit that you’ve made a misleading investment.

So since we’re all at risk of being blinded by our own love we should keep some things in mind when we are picking a partner. Things that are important to look at before we free ourselves to fall in love.

First thing is first. Love is not rare. You really think that you will meet the single most perfect person for you on this planet? There are 7 billion people on earth, and out of the thousand or so people that you will encounter in your lifetime you’ve barley scratched the surface. So when you think about all the happily married couples out there, to think that they all got lucky enough to pair with their optimal partner is foolish. It’s easier to find love than you think. I think we can all have confidence that the person that we end up being together with will be a good fit for us. I believe that we will naturally form real love with anyone that we decide to be with. So the goal isn't to go out there to search for love, but the goal is to go out there and search for someone that will be a great partner.

The way that I view it is that people have two forms of reasoning, logical and emotional. Logical reasoning is when we make decisions that are completely independent of emotion and usually benefit ourselves. Emotional reasoning is when we make a decision that will benefit our feelings or make us feel better even if the decision isn't the most logical. For example, if you're in love with someone but you know that they're a bad influence on you, you have two decisions that you can make. The logical decision would be to leave them because they are a bad influence, but the emotional decision would be to stay together because you're still in love with them.

People are always trying to balance these two ways of reasoning, logical and emotional. Either go with the logical decision because that's what's best for you, or go with the emotional decision because that's what is going to make you the most happy at that moment.

I think we should all aim towards using our logical reasoning when it comes to relationships. Since love is natural and instinctive, it will happen inevitably. So what we should be concerned about is if the relationship will make the most logical sense.

And like I said at the beginning of this whole mess, there isn't a right way and a wrong way to do it. Love and partnership is your own experience and you should do it however you want to.