Some people, I know, put so much trust in their partner that a divorce leaves them totally destroyed. Should they not have put their total trust in their partner? Some people seem to simply need that total trust, and divorcing from them is going to be horrible. Should you get married then, in the first place? (I should be organizing this post a little better, with subheadings, but the whole subject is just too nerve-wracking.) This is a subtle question, and I don’t have a good answer. As far as marriage, and similar significant relationships are concerned, everyone is an exception.
A movie that I watched recently with my wife was, on the face of it, just a chick flick (a type that I really don’t mind), but seemed to have some really good insights: it was “He’s just not that into you,” which is a clumsy (but eye-catching) title for a quite sensitive movie. The movie is all about girls making up rules of thumb to classify their relationships with romantic prospects (are they really interested vs. only slightly really interested, etc), and rules of thumbs as to how to signal your feelings to them, and how to signal the feelings you want to signal versus your true feelings, etc. The subject was too complex for them (the movie-makers) to address with complete success (especially given their intended audience), but they did a surprisingly good job at delivering a useful message.
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| The girls from "He’s just not that into you." |
Well, let’s look at it another way. Suppose you’re considering how important it is to make a general rule about short, blond, blue-eyed, abusive men. (There goes my short, blond, blue-eyed abusive audience, right there; but I guess I knew it was just a matter of time before it happened anyway! jk) How important is it, considering that the proportion of short, B, B-E, A men compared to all men is probably very small? Probably not important. But, it might be terribly important to anyone who tended to be attracted to short, B, B-E, A men. So, while a certain circumstance might be rare among general relationships, it might be quite the opposite for a particular person.
[My dog Fuzzy just walked up and asked me to pet her! It’s awesome that a dog can simply ask for a pat on the head, while people just don’t have the chutzpah to do it. And, let’s admit it: I enjoyed doing it as much as she enjoyed getting it. But it was a very short pet, so she grumbled before she walked off and lay down.]
Rules of thumb other people make up are likely to be useless in the world of romance. But let me try and figure out what marriage can mean in this brave new world in which we’re deconstructing everything.
As far as I can tell, given that the word marriage means different things to different people, it is the following. It is a partnership between two people (or more; who knows?) that involves a great deal of trust, and intimacy.
Because of the trust, the law permits a married couple to hold property in common, and have certain legal privileges, such as being parents, or having rights when one partner dies, e.g. to retirement or pension accounts, bank accounts, safety deposit boxes, and things of that nature. And of course there are the hospital visiting rights, which were central to the whole argument for the meaning of marriage to be expanded in law. All of this flows from the trust that each partner acknowledges in the other. And from the rights and the trust, there also flows a great deal of responsibility for each other, and each other’s affairs.
Because of the intimacy, which is usually both emotional and physical (but need not be both), the law assumes that if the couple produce children, that both ‘parents’ have equal rights over, and responsibilities towards, the offspring.
So there it is. A partnership that presumes some trust, and some intimacy, usually a lot of trust, and a lot of intimacy. And it logically follows that there are rights, and responsibilities. There are many sorts of legal partnerships that establish various sorts of rights and privileges and duties and responsibilities, but marriage is the one that assumes that there will be intimacy.
Just the other day, a close friend of ours was married for the first time. We thought, my wife and I, that he embarked on the road to marriage with a good deal of trepidation, which oscillated between well-disguised peaks on some occasions, to other times at which he seemed almost maniacally delighted at the prospect. On the whole, the couple seemed pleased to have successfully survived the nuptials, which too, on the whole, were conducted with legendary panache (except for the religious part, which seemed almost mythically awful).
I was seated at the reception with a young couple (friends of the bride and groom), the male member of which started off the meal tight-lipped, and evidently anticipating having to fraternize with someone with whom he expected to violently disagree. But gradually I was able to draw him out, and it turned out that it was the second marriage for him, and he was somewhat embarrassed at the failure of his first.
Well, there were at least three failed first marriages at that table, and it seems to me that being embarrassed about failed first marriages was, all things considered, a total waste of time.
Should people marry young, since we’re all aware that marriages between very young people are often doomed to failure? Well, if I had to do it over again, I absolutely would. There is simply nothing compared to the mad love of a young couple, completely lost in each other. I think the biggest problem that they face is the religious establishment that insists on their being married until death do them part. A young couple is likely to swear to anything, in the heat of their passion. Isn’t it a crime to make them swear to something that they are more than half likely to fail at?
On the other hand, it does seem silly to have a couple swear to love and cherish each other for at least 15 years, or whatever. Maybe The Lord will stand by them, and help them stay faithful, but it seems to me that The Lord has more important things to do, and His time is probably better spent making sure that, while the couple is together, as long as they have young children in their care, that those children are raised carefully and considerately, and that the parents set good examples to them. But, on reflection, a 15 year contract makes more sense every time I think about it. We’re not forcing the couple apart after 15 years; no, we hope they will live together forever. But to make them swear to something that will possibly make liars of them is silly, and weakens all vows they may take in anything.
It is usually religious extremists who insist of people taking oaths and making vows. President John Quincy Adams, I recently learned, refused to take his oath of office on a bible. I think it is an exemplary precedent, and I wish that more Presidents could choose different books on which to make the promise to serve the people with integrity. (If the President were to consider becoming a traitor for some reason, the additional fear of becoming an oath-breaker is hardly going to dissuade him from such a course of action.)
I can recommend marriage to almost anybody. The knowledge that there is a beloved friend at your back is amazingly liberating. I told you about our friend who recently married. Well, a little after he was engaged to his lady friend, the couple began to regularly visit both families together, and it was wonderful to see how much more relaxed they were than they had been, especially the half of the partnership that I had the opportunity of observing before. I can absolutely believe that, in general, married couples live longer than singles. I haven’t seen reliable statistics on the subject, but that’s what I would expect.
The couple need not share everything. My wife knows most of what there is to know about me, and I know most of what there is to know about her, but part of the limit of the sharing is not knowing the extent of the not sharing. But that’s how trust works: you don’t know everything, but you know enough to trust the other partner. Some couples have a lot of intimacy outside of their marriage, most do not. For a while, in the sixties and the seventies, there was a lot of experimenting with and about the institution of marriage. But once it was established that people could live together long term without marrying right away, the mystique of "open marriages", or at least, their attractiveness to most people, seems to have declined. But without the trust, the intimacy, and the partnership, there isn’t anything left.
If you were to agree with me that a marriage between, to begin with, two human beings, is simply a partnership based on trust and intimacy (which, as I tried to persuade you, leads to various rights and responsibilities towards each other, especially regarding children and property), it’s interesting to look at the entire marriage debate from this de-mythologized perspective. Why not permit two men or two women to marry? It is simply a matter of us getting used to the idea of two women looking at each other with love in their eyes, or two guys walking into a restaurant with a couple of kids in tow; you have to learn to imagine it with some degree of calmness. Unfortunately because of the way our society has evolved, I find that I can imagine a couple of women more easily and with more comfort than a couple of men, but I recognize that it is more to do with me than to do with them. Not all the decent couples in the world consist of one woman, and one man.
I think we should wait to expand the idea further, to permit an entire football team to get married to each other, for instance. At this point, I would suspect larger groups insisting on marriage to have ulterior motives (such as to sabotage the rights of gays and lesbians to marry), but I don’t think it makes sense for us to categorically refuse to consider other sorts of groups being allowed to marry, provided the basic principle of trust and intimacy is present. (I somehow can’t see how the word "intimacy" can be stretched to include very large groups, but I would shy away from being given a practical demonstration.)
A last tip for those thinking of getting married: get married privately, by a judge somewhere, and make sure the judge leaves out religious references completely, but don’t freak out if they creep in; life’s too short for freaking out about everything. Then, once you’re married, you can have a party, and don’t forget to encourage your friends to get to know each other, and don’t forget that your friends might not introduce themselves to everyone automatically. It just might be the last time you have everyone together. (Don’t try to get everyone together periodically; it’s going to be a logistical nightmare.)
It is interesting that being a couple does make it easier to relate to people! You can just watch your partner doing his or her stuff, or you can jump in and make a complete fool out of yourself with relative impunity. It is obviously up to the couple to make their own rules about how much to socialize, but I don’t think anyone should consider socializing as an obligation. If you have kids, I suppose, it does make sense to allow the child or children to mediate a certain degree of fraternization with people you would otherwise leave alone; this is part of the magic of having kids. If I have learned nothing else, one thing I have learned is that it is important to try to relate to and appreciate diverse people in your neighborhood, short of feeling obliged to do so. Some people know everything about everyone in their neighborhood, others leave their neighbors strictly alone. How your partner deals with neighbors is always a fascinating study, especially if you’re newly married, or if you’ve just moved in with a new partner. (In my own case, for instance, it very much appeared as though my wife was the "I mind my business, and I’ll let them mind theirs," sort of person. But pretty soon it emerged that she had chatted up the neighbors, and did know a lot more about them than I had ever dreamed of knowing. So ... what can I say? Either what she considered zero fraternizing with the neighbors was a lot higher than my own zero, or just being married made her a little more sociable. She probably hates my discussing her like this...)
I’ll stop here for the time being. I would like to add that we still look at each other sometimes, disbelieving that we could have fallen in together so perfectly. I suppose I could have been very happy with someone that was a lot more of a closed book to me than my wife is, but it would not have been so much fun. I hate the thought that she could have just as much fun with some other guy as she has with me, but I know it is probably true. Age does teach one that one is not the only hope for all the women---or men--- in the world. So my parting advice is: go forth, and get married, already!
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