Here Be Marriage |
A place to think about marriage. The personal essays here relate to the specific experience of the author, and are not meant to suggest, in any way, that there is a "right" or "wrong" way to get married, or that you even should get married. They are merely approaching marriage from the perspective of if you're going to do it, what questions need to be asked and answered? Why "Here Be Marriage?" It's a riff on the old "Here Be Dragons" map tag, and, in a way, marriage is the same sort of mythical thing. |
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4. It’s Longer
(Photo from trekearth.com)
Why You Might Want to Get Married #1: A lifelong relationship is different than one that isn’t.
I know that statement is so redundant it almost disappears, but it’s also the truest thing you can say about, at least, the hope of marriage. And this isn’t to say that marriage is the only way to have a lifelong relationship, because divorce rates already make a lie of that. But most people, other than the cynical, conniving, or citizenship-wanting, get married because they have the idea that it will last for the rest of their natural lives. It’s implicit in the vows and in the ceremony, and explicit in the legal paperwork. This thing is meant to last.
The question then for anyone considering marriage: Why do you want the relationship to continue for your entire life?
Here we have a prime example of the sort of essential question a person considering marriage should pose to himself, but one that is generally avoided because the answer seems too obvious or possibly insulting. Why do I want this to last forever? What, are you stupid? Because I love her! Because she’s the love of my life…OF. MY. LIFE. Of course I want it to last forever…
don’t I?
It’s also important to consider what that statement doesn’t say. It doesn’t say, nor does it necessarily follow, that a lifelong relationship is better than one that isn’t. There is no promise of a qualitative increase between a relationship with no temporal termination, and one that, whether perceived or not, ends in a year, or two years, or even 20 years. Relationships of different lengths are different, but not better or worse or bluer or more like a giraffe. They are different the way a popsicle and a pogo stick are different, but both perfectly adequate ways to spend five summer minutes.
In A Joint Account that Underwrites Our Marriage, David Sarasohn describes the accumulation of years with another person as a compounding asset:
Being single is all about the future, about the person you’re going to meet at Starbucks or after answering the next scientific compatibility questionnaire. Being married, after a certain point, is about the past, about a steadily growing history of moments that provide a confidence of comfort, an asset that compounds over time. What you share is what you’ve shared, and measuring your communal property in decades puts you in a freakishly high bracket.
If you’re truly lucky there will be no trade-off in your marriage between the excitingly new and the reassuringly old. You’ll gain all the benefits of knowing someone with the depth that only comes after decades and it will still feel surprising and fresh. You can augment that luck with hard work and dedication, and a determination not to fall into easy patterns - as Sarasohn puts it, “falling into a pattern is the opposite of falling in love.”
After twenty years of marriage you’ll have someone who knows you better than anyone else - with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails. What exactly are the benefits to someone knowing you for longer or “better” than anyone else? The answer feels self-evident until you try and enumerate the reasons. One would hope that with knowledge comes deeper empathy, deeper compassion, deeper patience, and a deeper understanding - and the older I get the more I’ve come to realize just how valuable these things are (especially patience). Drawbacks? The risk of falling into the aforementioned patterns, the entropy that envelopes almost any long-term endeavours, the risk of replacing understanding with rehearsed certainties.
My friend Adam uses the term “a learned dependency.” I think it’s true that a relationship can shift from one of support to one of unmonitored needs.
To some, the possible benefits of long-term relationships don’t outweigh all the seemingly inevitable drawbacks, and I can’t argue with that thinking. Relationships, short or long, are often hard work. The benefits are not always obvious, and at times we can persist with a relationship long after it has ceased to give anything back to either party. This is true of lovers, friends, and even careers. The only way to know is to give each relationship the attention and care it deserves.
My hope in getting married is that the joy Sharon and I give each other can be continued over a life-time, and I am willing to get all legal with it to find out. Do I need a piece of paper to make this real? No. It’s just the way I’m choosing to do it.
