When you love someone, you just can't love what suits you and leave out the "bad parts," you have to accept and deal with everything about that someone, the "good" and the "bad." Marriage is even harder, as you not only marry just the person, you marry "into" the whole family.

Danny thinks he can leave the family but, in my opinion, he could no more walk away from them than Michelle could from hers. There's more to the family than just Carmen, and he could never sever that connection (it's written in blood anyway) as long as he lives or his children (and their children, and grandchildren, etc.) live.

So even if Michelle admitted, to him and herself, she loved him, it's still going to take a lot of time and work building trust, getting to know each other (and the families), struggling to find a common ground, learning when to compromise or persist, etc and etc. Isn't this what committing oneself to marriage means?

And I couldn't be happier about it. This is the kind of stories that I love, problems stemming from within the relationship. I hate it when the writers treat the problems as solely external to the relationship. Like they did with Michelle And Jesse. Or to be correct, what I think they did with Michelle and Jesse, since I never paid much attention to what went with them. Let me guess, once they acknowledged they were in love with each other, every problem they ran into was laid at the others' feet, right? If only it weren't for so-and-so, we could be happy together, yadda, yadda, yadda.

B*llshit.

What may seem as external is actually a smoke screen to the heart of the problem. The writers have unfortunately been too lazy to delve into those problems, not just with Michelle and Jesse but many other couples as well. [I am hoping that it is] my luck that whoever's writing for Manny is aware that love is not the answer to everything, that it's not as simple as in fairytales.

kristi