26 August 2012

4-in-1 Person

The title of this post was the topic of my speech during my daughter's wedding reception yesterday, August 25. "Each of you got married to a 4-in-1 person. Incidentally, the nicest among those 4 persons is the one you just got married to." That was how I started my speech which I tried to make it short so I wasn't able to elaborate about the 3 other persons. In this post, I hope to give a clearer explanation about those three persons.

The second person pertains to the masculine side of the female spouse, or the feminine side of the male spouse, which manifests during certain situations. When a man cries for example, he is manifesting a feminine trait. On the other hand, a strong willed woman who makes a decision final is in her masculine state. That only means that occasional "exchange of roles" in marriage is perfectly normal.

The third person comes somewhat later and it is the scariest of the 4 persons because your spouse will show the traits of the person he or she hated most in the past. That person had shown the same undesirable traits your spouse will show at times in the future. I couldn't explain this phenomenon so we'll need a psychologist to do that.

The fourth person will be the last to manifest, showing traits or strong wants a person failed to do or have in the past because of constraints. In my case, I've always wanted to study interior design but was not financially able to take up such course earlier, so when I got my retirement pay at the age of more than 50, I enrolled in Philippine School of Interior Design. I just had a "taste" of the course though, because I realized later that going through a totally new career from scratch is not practical for my age, so just a background of it was enough.

Another example of the fourth person is a person who had wanted to follow the boldest trends in dressing up but was rather shy when he or she was younger, then overcame the shyness as time went by, so pursued that strong desire when already much older.

There will come a point any of the other 3 persons will be hard to tolerate so I told the newly-wed couple when that happens, "Listen to God. He has a special purpose why you were married to each other. His reason is quite different from yours."

That last statement was based on my personal experience. My union with my husband created two better humans than the two of us, and then the unexpected came much much later because we were blessed with the presence of an angelic special child and we were destined to become her parents. Most people would say the child is lucky to have us as her parents, but in reality it is us who were lucky to have her, because she has transformed us to gradually become better persons.