On Marriage

I knew this sounded weird when I said it to my mother, and I didn't mean anything deep or serious, but I said recently that I believe now that I can see that Jon and I will make it through our whole lives staying in this one marriage.  There has never been a question.  But you just never really know.  When you start out and you decide to marry someone, you don't know all that much about who you will become or who they will be (I am practicing using that terrible new pronoun which has been accepted by the dictionary-powers-that-be and by Rebecca the grammarian). You don't know whether you will get to a place where you can't do it any more, like if a tragedy hits and the two of you find that you don't have the strength to stay together.  You can't know whether one of you will meet someone else by accident and gradually fall into an unexpected parallel relationship and then have to decide what to do.  There is no way to predict, when you are in your 20's, that you will still really like this person in 5 years, or 15, or 30.

When I watched all those Oberlin marriage dissolve or explode -- the ones in my parents' generation -- I began to devise a social theory that didn't really end up working because people have feelings. But I seriously considered the idea that marriages should be set for a certain time period, like 20 years, and then people could decide whether they wanted to re-up or not.  It would be a contract that would get you through the child raising part of life, but would not require you to commit to the next phase. And the couple could agree on how long the next phase would go -- 10 years, 20 years. Divorce would have a different meaning. It wouldn't be a failure, it would be one of the options. Some marriages would be one phase, some would be two phases, some would do all three phases. Some people would renew and some people would say no thanks.  Of course there is a fatal flaw here and that is that both people might not agree on the choice, and then feelings would be hurt and that sort of undermines the whole point.

In Cutting for Stone, there is a very sweet version of this (I think it is sweet, anyway) where the wife has the opportunity once a year to tell her husband whether she wants to be married to him for the next year. He had to convince her to marry him in the first place, so I suppose he is at a disadvantage from the start, but they do love each other as equals (marriage is not as important to her). He  works hard all year to earn the right to continue to be married. Of course the story tells it much better than this, but it is a superb illustration of how a relationship could go, for a lifetime.

Anyway, back to me and Jon. Ever since we decided to get married, I have enjoyed the secure feeling of knowing that I had met the right person and I would stick with it.  I have been lucky.  We have been lucky.  In so many ways, it is so much simpler to have just one marriage in your life.  You get to skip all the logistics of separating yourselves and your shared family and your stuff. You just have to do the work of staying together. Both paths are hard, but one is much less messy.

While I have nothing original to say about marriage, I have plenty of opinions about what matters when you are figuring out who to marry.  I have told my children and everyone else many times: the fundamental qualities you want in a partner are kindness and intelligence (the kind of intelligence that feels like a match for you, not the same kind that you have).  If you start with that, you have a hope of succeeding.  If they are missing one of those, no hope.  There are no guarantees of success because there are dozens of other character traits that could make for a mismatch eventually.

But why are those two qualities so important?  For one thing, this is the person who you will spend your life talking to. So it is really much better if they are kind and smart because who wants to spend a lifetime talking to someone who can't be relied upon to have a good heart or who you feel is not your equal?

In the last week or so, I have spent many hours meeting with people or visiting,  having lunch or sitting at the hospital -- lots of social time and business conversations and reconnecting.  These are conversations I don't get to have as much during the farm season, so I have a lot of catching up to do.  But then it takes hours of talking in the night, just telling Jon all the things I have learned or thought about, and answering his many questions.  I swear I have spoken more words in the last week than I say in a month in the summer. Not all marriages have so much conversation material, I am sure, but I bet the ones that last a lifetime (happily) do. 

I don't tend to think that marriages that don't last a lifetime are failures.  They are just shorter marriages.  People suffer a lot when their marriages are shorter, and that feels unnecessary to me (even though it appears there is no way around it).  I believe that relationships are never a waste of time, if they are established with the best hopes and intentions. If something causes them to fray or wear out or explode, that is more work for everyone, but it does not need to be labeled a failure.  But if love is what makes being human meaningful, then we have to keep being in relationships.  Sometimes they turn out long and sometimes they turn out shorter.  No matter what, being in conversation is better than thinking all by yourself forever.

And you should never think that you are better than someone else if you happen to have a long marriage. You are just lucky.

(I know that I have not even entertained the idea that people don't have to be married.  That is clear.  But for the purposes of this train-of-thought, I am using the word marriage to stand for any committed long term relationship.)