Imagine you are on a cruise. Life is easy and simple there floating in the great big vast ocean. There are things to do, luxuries of life to enjoy and pleasures to be had. But you can't help but feel restless.

"There are no challenges", you think, "No excitment! No danger!"

This, of course, is understandable, since the most exciting event of the day is usually when some little kid does a belly flop into the pool and your peaceful world of sunbathing is briefly perturbed. Then one night it all changed, you realise that the ship  is in fact sinking. You only notice it by chance, but once you do, there's no changing your mind, you have to get off. Curiously enough, no one else believes you and you are left to find a way off the ship by yourself. Now your life is something that you dreamed of, filled with excitement, the thrill of danger and challenges. Unforeseen hurdle after another, you perservere when finally the day came and you jump ship, leaving that life of endless floating behind.

Luckily, you planned ahead and crash land shortly after on a deserted island.

"Ah! The feeling of land! The sand between my toes!" you think in delight, "I have finally awakened from that boring dream!"

As you start exploring the land, you are discovered by a tribe living on this island. They are friendly and invite you into their fold. As you soon learn, all of the members were deserted here at different times, they made an agreement to band together in order to survive. And you soon realise that everyone puts in their all to help the tribe survive as a whole.

"This is a whole new way of life," you think with glee, "a much more exciting way of life."

At your second week on the island, one of the tribewomen who's been loosely in charge of you, pulls you aside and let's you in on something. Turns out that your tribe isn't the only one on the island, there are other tribes who want the land that you live on. The only way to protect yourselves is to understand the lay of the land better. Whoever has more knowledge of the land, will be able to better predict how things will turn out on the island. Knowledge here is power. Her job was this mountain on the northeast side of the island. Unfortunately she will be unable to continue in a few weeks, so the job has been decided by the head of the tribe to be passed down to you. She has already done a lot, but there is still much more to do.

Bust is your bubble of bliss, not only have you never surveyed land before, but you have no knowledge of how it is even done. The extent of your knowledge is that what stands before is a mountain. You are now only armed with your knowledge, previous acquired but completely irrelevant skills and experience to guide you.

And that is what my last year has been like. (minus all the metaphors)

As the snow starts melting away, I'm always reminded of something that I used to do as a kid with way too much imagination and even more alone time. I used to imagine that the piles and piles of snow that formed on the sidewalks, the sides of the road and in my backyard were not just mounds of ordinary ice crystals, but that they housed tiny invisible inhabitants whose size and lifespans were infinitesimal compared to ours.

They would live in the snow: in houses, apartments, condos, huts or other types of living quarters. They would have grocery stores, big malls, restaurants and movie theatres. They would have streets, avenues, highways, roads, and even alleys. They would spent their time like we do, working, playing, communicating, learning and loving those around them. The best part of this tiny world is that what we as people would see as just plain white snow made of just frozen water, would actually be so much more to them. Instead of being just white, at the scale of these tiny people, the snow would be a whole rainbow of colors, probably with names that haven't been made up. Instead of being just frozen water, the minerals and particles contained in the water would be considered their natural resources. They would mine the snow for it and used them for food, clothing, building materials, and various other things to buy and sell. Because they are so small, other piles of snow that were a certain distance away or not connected would be like the other planets to us, light years away. And similar to our world, they would also have natural disasters to ruin their perfect world. Instead of hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, typhoons and tornadoes, they would have disasters where a whole portion of their world and people would be taken away and moved, or a slew of large dirt particles would fall on their upper city, or a footprint sized are of their world would be crushed and would have to be rebuilt. Of course from their point of view, those would be unexplainable natural disasters that would randomly ravaged the world. They would live their short short lifespans, going thru generations and generations before one day the weather would get warm or rainy and the snow would melt and their world would once again disappear from ours.

I went to lunch with my mom today and of all the things she said, one particular piece of advice stuck out. She said, "the person that you marry isn't going to be the person that you are in love with, it will be someone who you can grow old with and spend the rest of your life with." The way that she said it, it seemed like she was emphasizing that the person you fall in love with and are madly in love with and the person that you end up marrying and being happy with for the rest of your life were two separate people. This isn't the first time I've heard this from someone so it wasn't a very big surprise. But I was surprised to hear it from my mom, mostly because all my life I was under the illusion that my parents were in love and super compatible. But that may have just what my childlike innocence and idealism wanted me to see.

When I was interning at Tufts a few summers back, I was working under this Ph.D candidate, Polly. One day we were talking about her and her husband and she told me the story about how they ended up together. They met due to the matchmaking of some relatives and got along relatively well. They didn't really feel that "spark" and ended up being good friends. Then under the pressure to get married by their relatives, they got married and moved to the U.S. to start their life together. She said that in the beginning it was really just like being with her best friend all the time. After spending a lot of time together and sharing a lot of hardships and common experiences, they started developing feelings for each other. Eventually these feelings even turned into love. Her conclusion was that love isn't something that is necessary at the beginning of a marriage and that it can be fostered and grown after years of companionship and mutual understanding.

I'm not sure if I want to accept this perspective. Yes I have seen instances where it has worked out this way and the couple ends up being very happy together, happier than maybe they could have been with people they were "in love" with. And yes, there are plenty of cases where a couple who are ''in love" and get married that don't work out, or even ends very badly. But is that enough to conclude that you the person that you are "in love" with won't also be the person that you can be happy spending the rest of your life with? I really would love to hold on to the romantic notion that my husband will not only be someone I understand and respect, but also someone I love and adore. That the driving force behind making my marriage work is not only responsibility and determination but also love, a desire to see the other person happy and my own desire to be with that person. But how do I do this when I get all this unsolicited advice saying it's just not possible?