Two views of marriage
I wanted to share these two posts about marriage that were in response to the same post about "false advertising" I wrote about last week. They’re very different, but both lovely.
Becca at Not Quite Sure writes:
"But I see marriage as two people coming together as autonomous individuals to share their lives. Indeed, in my vision, it is that very autonomy that generates the pleasure and productivity of marriage… But our bodies? Our thoughts? Our work? Our friends? Our passions? Those are very much our own, if sometimes, happily, shared, and one of the cornerstones of our marriage is that we each try to enable the other’s life… Our marriage is in no way perfect–sometimes I wish it would just go away, or maybe I wish he would just go away–but one of the things I like best about it is that in it I can be fully myself, knowing that S is supporting and appreciating me for myself, whatever or however I am."
Dutch at Sweet Juniper writes:
"At some point you could almost stop drawing a line between us as individuals, and consider every step that we took and choice that we made as done together. In that way, we were married before we were married. We were one… I realize that kind of experience before marriage might put us in a minority, but I hope that most successful marriages go through that once the knot is tied. Individuality and individual interests sort of become secondary to what works as a unit. Passion doesn’t recede, but grows as you find completion in another person. All of that horrible pain of loneliness disappears. What happens on the surface means nothing compared to the inward attraction and bond. One partner can’t "let themselves go" because that partner is inextricably bound to the other…"
I guess Tolstoy was wrong.
My image of my marriage is closer to Becca’s, but Dutch’s comment about "growing up together" very much resonated with me, as T and I met when we were both 18. My image is of the trees that you sometimes see growing right next to each other — they’re separate, and have their own root trunks and root systems (sometimes they’re even different species), but they’ve each been shaped by the other, and in places their branches intertwine.
(Image borrowed from: http://www.ethicalfutures.co.uk/ethics.html Found via google images for "two trees intertwined", which also resulted in lots of ketubah pictures. Guess it’s not an original idea.
March 28th, 2006 at 9:33 am
Have you read “The Good Marriage : How and Why Love Lasts” by Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee? It is a summary of a long term sociology experiment tracking successful marriages. Well written, and very helpful to me and my wife. Wallerstein is the one who wrote “the unexpected legacy of divorce”, tracking how divorce affects children later in life. My sister married a child of divorce and found it useful. In related books, I’ve also been meaning to read “Fighting for your Marriage”, but haven’t found the time.
March 28th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
The image is very Khalil Gibran. “Let their spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of heaven dance between you…And stand together, yet not too near together. For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”
March 28th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
The Gibran quote isn’t quite what I had in mind — it implies more space than I was imagining. I do think I’m not the person who I would have been if I hadn’t spent the last 16 years (is that really possible?) with T.
March 28th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
The doubled tree symbol also turns up in Greek mythology, in the story of Baucis and Philemon. There’s a version of it here:
http://www.online-mythology.com/baucis_philemon/
March 28th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
No, not a new idea, but a powerful–and apparently universal–one. When we were married, a friend gave us an excerpt from a Chinese poem in calligraphy that evokes the dual role of a strong partnership as that which both enables and anchors. The English translation:
“In heaven may we be like birds
that wing to wing do fly;
on earth like aged trees,
whose sturdy branches intertwine.”
-quoted from Bai Juyi’s poem Song of Enduring Sorrow
Personally, I prefer to think of “heaven” and “earth” as referring to different, simultaneous aspects of our own temporal existence, but in any case, it’s a beautiful image.