Love and Like

We have been duped by "happily ever after."
Too often people fall in love and plan on going off into the sunset together, "happily ever after." Whether it is from watching too much television or other overexposure to fairy tales, the assumption is that love will conquer all and anything about the other which is unlikeable will be resolved (within an hour or half-hour including time for commercials.)
And maybe that might be possible, but the divorce statistics cast doubt on that. Couples who have married their True Love return from the honeymoon and discover that those annoying habits so easily overlooked before have grown in scope and importance. Yes, you may still love him or her, but you don't like 'em a lot!
We are not talking here about what I call the Jekyll-and-Hyde  syndrome, where a person deliberately conceals  an ugly behavior in order to deceive another. Abusers, alcoholics, others of that type will seem quite nice and even lovable during the courtship, but then become totally different once saying "I do." Yes, that is an issue, but no, I'm talking about something much more common: how can you love someone you don't like? Or conversely, if you don't like someone, should you love them?
We have made the whole issue too monolithic and  cut-and-dried. Even with those we don't like, there is some redeeming factors that we do like. We can handle that in reverse: when we do like someone, we are willing to tolerate those quirks that we are all too aware of. But first we have to accept the reality that it is possible to love someone and  not like everything about them.
"Love" and "like" are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it helps if we do like the one we love. Friends make the best lovers, and vice versa. But that does not mean we  need to put up with those things we hate in the people we love. It just means that those times when we don't like someone very much, we can still love them.
All  this is much more work than just giving up on the whole thing. It means deciding if the person is really as  important to us as our heart tells us. It means hanging on when the most important person in your life is driving you crazy. It means recognizing those things in the other you value, and like.
Sorry, there is  no "happily ever after." But there is "happily today."