A letter to the editor last week made me rethink my column choice. It was going to be about vanity and the horror I felt when I recently discovered wrinkles around my eyes. But alas, I will reflect on a more serious topic that hopefully my readers will not find too “trite.”

Our country is at war. I used to be able to compartmentalize that. I had enough things to worry about so that was how I justified keeping the war in Iraq in the back of my mind. The war was something that was on the news every night, not something that influenced my life directly.

Then one of my best friends from college married a soldier last summer. Initially I just couldn’t understand her choice. The woman with whom I shared a room and my secrets was going to marry a guy who was certainly headed to Iraq. The wedding was planned quickly, and there was always a chance that her fiance would get deployed before the ceremony.

I couldn’t understand why she was doing that. Why not wait until he got back? Rushing to marry someone because they were going off to war? I didn’t think of people still doing that. And mostly I was just worried about my friend.

But since the wedding and her husband’s deployment to Iraq, I have realized that what my friend did was no different that what all of us do when we’re in relationships as adults.

My friend’s husband was in the army for years before he met my friend. He didn’t enlist thinking that he would end up leaving a woman he hadn’t even met yet to fight in a questionable war. But that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to forgive.

My friend said that she doesn’t direct her anger about the situation toward politicians. But somehow she must come to terms with the hurt she is experiencing. As her husband should be finishing his commitment to the army and isn’t allowed to come home, she has had to get past just understanding his situation and move to truly supporting him.

All of us who are dating adults have to do what my friend did. What I mean by that is that adults have a past of some sort. We have to accept that the decisions our partner made in the past were not meant to hurt us now.

Couples who meet when they’re really young don’t have to deal with this. They don’t have someone else’s past to accept. And sometimes that makes me jealous because I’m now old enough that anyone I would consider dating now is going to have had quite a bit of life before me.

But I would like to pretend that some day when my friend and I are old and gray, we’ll look back at these relationship struggles and say that they were worth it.