O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee
To temper man: we had been brutes without you.
---Otway, Venice Preserved, I, 1"
Sotera Luningning Milagra Perez,
I love to say your name.
I love you and I know that I always will.
I vow to be your intimate friend and partner through our lives. I am your husband, your equal, your opposite, your complement.
I offer you my love, trust, fidelity, confidence, compassion, encouragement, tolerance, and compromise.
I make these offers to you as a vow I will keep through our hardships and triumphs, good times and bad, sickness and health, wealth or poverty, through fantastic sex, impotenence and menopause, for better or worse and other assorted fails, until one or both of us gets to find out juist what it is that happens when we die.
Sotera, I respect and admire your courage, your individualism, your strong opinions, your willingness to stand against me when I'm wrong or to bend when you are, your inability to be incorrect on linguistic matters, your diverse creativity, your sensuality, your intellect, mothering skills, and your world view.
I have altered my life because the world I have gained with you is superior to the things I may have had without you.
With Jack, we are now related by blood. You are my family and I am yours. Perhaps now with Jack we even have some evolutionary significance.
I lean on you in my weaknesses and offer my strenth through yours.
When times become worse, I will strive to make them better as we strive to find harmony among our own individuality, interdependence, and unity of person and grown and change together.
I've been reluctant to assign words to our commitment or to label our relationship. Words and definitions seem to establish boundaries and set limitations. And so, I don't claim that these few comments I've made are in any way complete as they never could be.
So without being more verbose and perhaps setting more paradigms, let me say it simply,
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