Marriage: Don't Look Back

Sometimes I wonder: When people don't believe marriage is morally, legally, or socially necessary, why do they marry? If they go into marriage feeling free to divorce for any reason or no reason, what's the point of marrying? What does marriage mean to those for whom it has no meaning?

Perhaps they want the things associated with traditional marriage--a deeper and more substantial romance than can be had on the cheap, security, dignity, a wonder that is more than fleeting.

But they want all these things without accepting the very thing that gave marriage all these associations--a covenant instead of an empty contract, an absolute commitment involving a sacred and transcendent bond.

But the contradiction will out. In Psychology Today Polly Shulman explains what happens when we see personal fulfillment as a necessary condition for marital commitment, rather than as a possible fruit of unshakable commitment:

We subject the relationship to constant review: Would I be happier, smarter, a better person with someone else?

... The steadfast focus on our own potential may turn a partner into an accessory in the quest for self-actualization, says Maggie Robbins, a therapist in New York City. “We think that this person should reflect the beauty and perfection that is the inner me—or, more often, that this person should compensate for the yuckiness and mess that is the inner me,” says Robbins.

Marriage is no longer about us, but about me. And this is a passive sort of me, concerned with how you make me feel, how you make me look, whether you make me crazy or make me love you. I pretend you have a vast amount of power over me; but in truth you have no power at all, because however much I try to shift the blame and burden, I am the only human being who can--with God's help--shape my own soul.

“Marriage is not supposed to make you happy. It is supposed to make you married,” says [psychiatrist Frank Pittman]. “When you are all the way in your marriage, you are free to do useful things, become a better person.” A committed relationship allows you to drop pretenses and seductions, expose your weaknesses, be yourself—and know that you will be loved, warts and all.

But even that doesn't tell the whole story. Marriage isn't just a safe place to be yourself, though it is that. Marriage is where you finally get to forget about yourself--and don't we sometimes get tired of always thinking of ourselves?--and think about someone else for a change, loving him, putting him first, without keeping score.

When you lose your life, you find it. Somebody said that. Somebody proved it.

--AW and JW