Of love, duty and obligation

I've been wanting to write this for the longest time, but never really got about doing it. I'm writing after much consideration what's been happening around me for some years now. I'm talking about duty and obligation. Are you bounded by duty and obligation, by your responsibility to the person whom you had promised to spend eternity with? But when the romance and passion fizzles, where does that leave you?

The other day during dinner, I was told a story about how love (probably) faded a long time ago for a friend, but because of the many number of years they'd spent together, and because of duty and obligation, they ignored the signs and applied for a flat together, only to give it up after a year and a half and with tears and heartaches in both families. Some years back, a bridegroom left the bride at the altar just a month before the wedding because he fell in love with somebody else. A couple of weeks ago, I was told the heartbreaking story of how the husband packed up in the wee hours of the morning and told the wife he was leaving because he doesn't love her anymore (in fact, he fell out of love with her for a very long time) after more than a decade together.

You know what I'm thinking? If they could have stuck to their guts then because of duty and obligation, why couldn't they carry on with it till the end? Don't they mean it when they recite "till death do us part" in their wedding vows? So what - that talk is cheap and that I'm right all this while? But you know what? I don't want to be right. It breaks my heart to see love falling apart.

Don't say I love you unless it's true till the end; don't say I love you only to say I don't love you anymore. But of course, we don't even know what going to happen in the next minute, much less till the end. Confused yet? A dear friend once told me that life is short, so we should live life by the moment, doing what we feel is right at that point of time, but we cannot guarantee that we will have the same conviction the next moment, so even when promises are broken, we should be grateful that at least it had happened.