Introduction: “Do You Know Why You’re Here?”
“Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate.” — W.H. Auden, 1970
I never give toasts at weddings. I prefer to sit quietly under the twinkling lights enjoying other people’s efforts. Some are perfect mini-sermons — but better, because at the end there’s champagne. Some go rattling off the rails, and that’s fun too. At a wedding I attended recently, one groomsman paused mid-toast and — unable to remember the rest of what he meant to say — just sat down.
At my own wedding, twelve years ago, my Texan father-in-law delivered a Biblical homily, my New York father a witty speech, a Midwestern aunt a eulogy for a late family member, and my best friend, who lives in D.C., a gentle roast. All lovely. Then a not-so-close friend of my husband’s leapt up and surprised us with a poem he’d written about (I think) taxis. As soon as he was done, I thanked everyone and announced it was time to eat.
Finding something new or helpful to say about marriage is borderline impossible. “It’s difficult to think about marriage,” says a friend married thirty years. “It’s like trying to describe your own face.” And so we dubiously paraphrase Ephesians: “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,” a.k.a. “Don’t go to bed angry.” Though personally I have avoided many fights by going to bed angry and waking up to realize I hadn’t been wronged — just tired.
Now in the second decade of my second marriage, I can’t look newlyweds in the eye and promise they’ll never regret marrying. (Well, I not sober. Maybe this is why weddings correlate with binge drinking.) I adore my husband and plan to be with him forever. I also want to run screaming from the house because the person I promised to love all the days of my life insists on falling asleep to Frasier reruns. “The first twenty years are the hardest,” an older woman once told me. At the time I didn’t know what she meant, but now I know all too well.
And that is why I don’t give wedding toasts — because I’d probably end up saying that even good marriages sometimes involve flinging remote controls at the wall.
After a recent rough patch, my husband, Neal, and I took a road trip to Albany to visit the priest who married us, Father Paul J. Hartt. We stationed our nine-year-old son in the next room with a Lego set, and sat on a couch before the man who more than a decade earlier bound us together until death. We asked him to remind us, again, why that was a good idea.
Father Hartt said the question Do you know why you’re here? is vital to marriage, and even embedded in the most popular Christian wedding ceremony. He pointed to The Declaration of Consent from The Book of Common Prayer. That’s the section early on that sounds like the Vows but isn’t. (It includes the phrase “Will you have this man to be your husband?”)
“It’s a historical holdover, but it’s worth pondering whether there might be something to it today,” said Hartt. He explained the Declaration’s original purpose via a hypothetical:
Like, Neal’s dad and your dad decide one day that it’d be a really good thing if you two got married, because it would be good for business. Never mind that Neal’s mentally impaired and you’re 14. So your dad one morning says, “Put a dress on. We’re going to the fair.” And next thing you know, you’re in a church getting married. So this Declaration part was supposed to be asking you, “Do you know why you’re here?” If you didn’t, the church was supposed to provide refuge. Some burly deacon would sweep you away into the sacristy while we dealt with your fathers.
But I honestly believe that there are a lot of weddings over which I preside where I am not altogether sure the people know why they’re there. They’re certainly of age. They’re certainly not imbeciles. But even after the couple has spent a lot of time together, I’m not sure they know. The problem today is that all the focus seems to be on: How do you get married? No one’s spending any time on: How do you stay married? And I think that’s a cultural crisis, actually.
“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1880. No wonder that in the throes of romantic love we tend not to reflect on the meaning of marriage beyond a vague (and unfortunate) expectation of happiness.
“It’s often tough to get couples grappling with any level of theological significance of what they’re doing,” said Father Don Waring, who performs fifteen weddings a year at Grace Church in Manhattan. “Most really don’t seem to be able to articulate what’s going to be different the day after versus the day before. This concept of making a lifelong commitment to each other, they sort of back into it. Their lives are already wound up together…What’s lost is — how is our life going to be different after we go through this? I wonder if that loss of ‘before versus after’ is what leads to the dissolution of some marriages. There’s not a grasping of the fact that you’re doing something existential and theologically significant.”
“On one hand, I have a lot of compassion for couples early on,” said Rabbi David Adelson. “How could they know? Like all of the challenging and worthwhile undertakings that we engage in in our lives, there’s no way to know what it’s going to be like. On the other hand, I think there are tons of unrealistic expectations. It’s part of my task to introduce realistic ones: Marriage is a microcosm of life. It’s natural to seek stability, stasis, guarantees. We want things to remain okay. But that’s never the truth in any aspect of our lives.”
“Divorce was invented about three days after marriage,” a scholar told me, confirming my suspicion that marriage has never not been hard.
A therapist wrote in 1926 that marriage “can be the gate of an earthly Eden, but it is, in actual fact, often a hell of torment.” The challenges of monogamy, cohabitation, joining finances, raising children together — they are ancient and they are predictable. So is our disappointment in marriage, from which we crave so much.
The author of a remarkably frank 1945 book called The Happy Family wrote, “Most of the complaints about the institution of holy matrimony arise not because it is worse than the rest of life, but because it is not incomparably better.”
We suffer in marriage because we expect it to be different — purer, deeper, gentler — than other relationships. We expect both our partners and ourselves to be better, too — more patient, more faithful, more generous — than we are. We trick ourselves into believing ourselves exceptional, first in the depth of our passion and then in the breadth of our failure. I find it some consolation that my marriage is for the most part neither better nor worse than the millions of unions throughout history.
“One of the things I’ve found consistently in pastoral counseling around marriages,” said Father Hartt, “is that inevitably people think that what they’re experiencing is a sign of their uniquely defective interpersonal drama. One thing about marriages is that they’re amazingly similar.”
***
I’ve always found that parties are better on rainy nights. I think it’s because bad weather weeds out the ambivalent, the uncommitted. To leave the house in a storm, you must do the work of finding an umbrella or preparing yourself for a soaking. This requires faith that leaving your dry house will pay off, that you will travel through the cold, dark, unwelcoming night, and end up somewhere better than where you left. People who only ever go to parties on sunny days miss the joy of reaching a cozy room during a downpour. People who don’t marry miss both the pelting hardships of marriage and its warm rewards.
Getting married involves a vow, made before witnesses, never to leave. The day after a wedding, even if nothing but the jewelry appears different — you’re keeping your names, you already shared a home, a bed, friends — something important has changed: from then on, every day you stay you keep a promise. In this, we give something to ourselves and to others: hope — that in steadfastly loving someone, we ourselves, for all our faults, will be loved; that the broken world will be made whole.
Marriage is a vow to stay with someone forever. What an insane thing to promise. What a burden, and what a gift.
Such are the thoughts I keep to myself, sitting in rented folding chairs, watching friends begin their married lives. To the newlyweds, I say congratulations, and I mean it sincerely. To say out loud the rest of what I’m thinking would be bad manners. And so I’ll say it here instead.
Toast 1: Paying for Each Other’s Mistakes
“If a man could receive the advantages of marriage without the duty of standing day and night at a woman’s side in all sorts of wind and weather, then nobody would hesitate to get married.” — Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, 1774
While away at a conference in Minneapolis, I was awakened at dawn by a call from Neal in our New York apartment. Our son, Oliver, then eight, had just roused him with the suspicion that they might not make their 7:30 a.m. flight to join me because it was now 7:40 and they were still at home.
The original plan had us all traveling to Minneapolis together. I would attend my conference. Neal, a musician, would do a show at a cool club. Oliver would get hotel pool time. A triple win. Beyoncé and Jay-Z had just completed their “On the Run” tour, baby Ivy in tow. Neal and I joked about how this would be our own version, only we would be playing to crowds of 20 rather than 20,000, and instead of occupying five-star hotels, we would be staying three-in-a-room at the downtown Super 8.
Then Neal was offered a good gig for the same day we were set to leave — so he called to change his and Oliver’s tickets. Changing them, he learned, was going to cost more than buying a new pair of one-way tickets out. So he did that instead, planning to use their original return tickets, not realizing that if you don’t use the first leg, they cancel the second. That meant buying new, last-minute return tickets at a cost somewhere between “Ugh” and “Oh dear God, what have you done?”
Neal and I both freelance, so money has served as a perennial source of stress in our marriage. I grew up middle- to upper-middle-class among liberal intellectuals in downtown Manhattan. He grew up working-class in a conservative Pentecostal community in the piney woods of East Texas. He thinks we’re rich now because we can afford to fly as much as we do, while without a financial cushion (and more years than not we haven’t had one at all), I walk around under a cloud of low-level anxiety, positive that we are one missed payment away from destitution.
My trick for not letting this poison our relationship as much as it could requires engaging in what I call “marriage math” — an advanced-placement calculus designed to quash resentment.
Sample Problem: The theater paid for Neal’s new one-way ticket, so that left our son’s, at $220, plus $776 for the new tickets — nearly a thousand dollars’ worth of questionable travel strategy. Well, Neal quit smoking in 2006. Minus a relapse in 2009, that’s still nine years of saving $8 a day at least, or $33,696. When our son was a baby and I was working full time, we ordered takeout a lot — say, $8,320 a year for ages 0-3, or $24,960. My husband started cooking, and now we save most of that. He only has one pair of shoes at a time, which saves $400 a year, so over the 15 years we’ve been together that equals $6,000. And $64,656, minus the $996… He’s still up more than $63K. By that logic, I owe him a Lexus.
But now, my family had missed the first leg of the new itinerary, outstripping even my practiced algorithms. I imagined we would have to buy the tickets a third time, and felt the familiar money panic, coupled with rage that his errors were costing me. I’d been taking my hotel-room coffee to-go to save a couple of dollars each morning. And for what? It didn’t matter how good I was. Delta owned us now.
On hold with the airline, Neal was texting me sexy emojis.
Eggplant. Eggplant. Eggplant.
“Focus,” I replied, with an emoji of an airplane.
Neal sent me an emoji of a flan.
We’ve been together since I was 24 and Neal was 25. We married in our late 20s. By the timeline of our peers in New York, I was a child bride. A decade later, we find ourselves listening to in-thrall thirtysomething and fortysomething friends describe in their vows all the ways in which they will excel at being married.
“I will always be your best friend,” they say, reading from wrinkled pieces of paper held in shaking hands. “I will never let you down.” They use analogies of rivers, of bolts of lightning, of vines wrapping around trees. Drunk on their feelings, they strike elaborate, ludicrous bargains: to never tell a lie, to always think of each other first, to say “I love you” every single day.
I clap along with everyone else; I love weddings. Still, there is so much I want to say.
I want to say that one day you and your husband will fight about missed flights, and you’ll find yourself wistful for the days when you had to pay for only your own mistakes. I want to say that at various points in your marriage, may it last forever, you will look at this person and feel only rage. You will gaze at this man you once adored and think, “It sure would be nice to have this whole place to myself.”
Over the years, Neal and I have each fallen short of various marital vows, failing each other in significant ways. We have suffered from the stresses of parenthood, work, and coexisting in an apartment so compact it’s been likened to a ship’s cabin. We have had fights about everything from who to be friends with to how to handle our money to whether or not we believe enough in each other to how to park the car. We have shown each other kindness, generosity, and faith, but also irritation, resentment, and white-hot fury.
We have made big compromises, like he wanted to wait to have children but agreed to have a baby just two years after we married, and I wanted more kids but agreed to stick with one as long as he would let me amass an army of godchildren. And we make small compromises every day, like I tolerate his bags of stuff always spilling out from under our bed and he puts up with me occasionally reorganizing the cabinets so it takes him an hour to find the screwdriver. Usually these things are merely annoying. Sometimes they resemble grounds for divorce.
In Zen Buddhism, meditation helps practitioners detach from the cycle of desire and suffering. In my brief stint as a religious studies major, I preferred Pure Land Buddhism, an alternate path to enlightenment for people who aren’t built for detachment, perhaps because they love the world too much, or because they hate it too much, or both.
Back in college, one of my professors read us a poem by the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa, who was born in 1763 and, thanks to a long run of terrible luck, saw his loved ones die one after the other. He wrote: “The world of dew is / A world of dew / And yet, and yet.”
“Dew is a Buddhist symbol of impermanence,” my professor said. “Issa is saying that one who understands Buddhist philosophy does not necessarily transcend pain and anguish. ‘And yet, and yet’ means, ‘I can’t help crying.’”
I think about that all the time: “And yet.”
Such hedging, to me, is good religion, and also the key to a successful marriage. In the course of being together forever, you come across many doubt-stoking “and yets,” only some of them involving domestic air travel.
I love this person, and yet when I’m sick, he’s not nurturing. And yet we don’t want the same number of children. And yet I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be single again.
The longer you are with someone, the more “and yets” rack up. You love this person. Of course you plan to be together forever. And yet forever can begin to seem like a long time. Breaking up and starting fresh — which seemingly half of your playground friends will do by the time your children reach elementary school — can begin to look like a wonderful and altogether logical proposition.
But “and yet” works the other way, too. Even during the darkest moments of my own marriage, I have felt these nagging exceptions. And yet, we have this wonderful child together. And yet, we still make each other laugh. And yet, I still love him.
And so you don’t break up, and you outlast some more of your friends’ marriages.
My own parents have been married since 1973, weathering a how-much-time-do-you-have list of crises. I went to my mother for advice once when Neal and I were fighting. “How do you stay married?” I asked her. Her reply: “You don’t get divorced.”
At the time, I thought her response flip, but now I consider it wise. Couples who have been married forty and fifty years tell me they’ve been on the verge of leaving many times. And then they just… didn’t.
Gwyneth Paltrow publicly said, not long before her own split, that her parents said they’d stayed together because: “We never wanted to get divorced at the same time.”
“My parents were too poor to get divorced,” my friend Rachel told me that same day in Minneapolis. “And so they stayed married and then it seemed too late to get divorced, and now they’re glad.”
It reminds me of a story I recently heard about a church that a century ago couldn’t afford to maintain its organ and so walled it up. Generations later, members of the church knocked a hole in the wall to discover a priceless instrument.
Later that morning, while waiting to hear from Neal about the flights, I decided to kill time looking at nearby houses on the Trulia’s app. When I used to travel alone as a teenager, I would stare at houses wherever I was and imagine what it would be like to live there. I still do that, but now I can also call up Trulia on my phone and see how much they cost.
Comparing houses in Minneapolis, I found I actually preferred the cheaper, more ramshackle, family-friendly ones, like a two-bedroom that had “classic old world charm.” Hardwood floors! A built-in buffet! So much better, really, than the pricier one-bedroom I would live in as a single person on the other side of Powderhorn Park, with its new ceiling fans, three cedar closets, and breakfast nook.
What would I even do with three cedar closets?
Meanwhile, still no word from Neal about the flights.
One thing I love about marriage (and I love a lot of things about marriage) is that you can have a bad day or even a bad few years, full of doubt and confusion and storming out of the house. But as long as you don’t get divorced, you are no less married than those couples who seem to have it all figured out.
You can be bad at a religion and still be 100 percent that religion. Just because you take the Lord’s name in vain doesn’t make you suddenly a non-Christian. You can also be a sinner. In fact, I think it’s good theology that no matter how hard you try, you are sure to be a sinner, just as you are sure to be lousy, at least sometimes, at being married. There is perfection only in death.
Years ago at a bridal shower, a bridesmaid turned to the assembled women when the bride-to-be was in the bathroom, and said of the engaged couple, “I give them five years.” It was so cruel it took my breath away. (That the rest of us had been thinking something similar was beside the point.) And yet, that couple is still together even as couples with better forecasts have imploded.
It is easy for people who have never tried to do anything as strange and difficult as being married to say marriage doesn’t matter, or to condemn those who fail at it, or to mock those who even try. But there is so much beauty in the trying, and in the failing, and in the trying again. Peter renounced Jesus three times before the cock crowed. And yet, he was the rock upon whom Christ built his church.
This, it turns out, is how a marriage lasts: we stay in it long enough to see things change, for good and for ill and for good again. Definitive studies or scurrilous gossip about “happy marriages” or “unhappy marriages” have nothing new to tell us. As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour.
That Neal and I sometimes want to kill each other doesn’t make ours an unhappy union. That we sometimes let each other down does not make it a failure. There is wisdom in the old Jack Benny joke: “My wife Mary and I have been married forty-seven years, and not once have we ever had an argument serious enough to mention the word ‘divorce’ … ‘murder,’ yes, but ‘divorce,’ never.” So, too, in the John Updike claim “all blessings are mixed.”
The struggle for me is to bear in mind my own fallibility. Within a year of our Minneapolis trip, I would miss a connecting flight through Texas, costing me — us — $327 and my sense of superiority. Neal would respond to the news of my error as if his team had just won a playoff game.
At weddings, I do not contradict my beaming newlywed friends when they talk about how they will gracefully succeed where nearly everyone in human history has floundered. I only wish I could tell them that in this marriage, occasionally they will suffer — and not only sitcom-grade squabbles, but possibly even dark-night-of-the-soul despair.
That doesn’t mean they are condemned to divorce, just that it’s unlikely they will be each other’s best friend every single minute forever. And that while it’s good to aim high, it’s quite probable they will let each other down many times in ways both petty and profound that in this blissful moment they can’t even fathom.
I would go on to say (had I not by that point surely been thrown out of the banquet hall): Failure is part of being human, and it is definitely part of being married. It’s part of what being alive means, occasionally screwing up in expensive ways. And that’s part of what marriage means, sometimes hating this other person but staying together because you promised you would. And then, days or weeks later, waking up and loving him again, loving him still.
Finally, nearly two hours after Neal’s original flight left, I texted him to ask if he was still on hold with the airline.
“We just got in a cab,” he replied. “Flying Air Wisconsin, baby!”
“Did you have to pay for the tickets again?” I texted.
The phone was silent. In that quiet moment, sitting in my Minneapolis hotel room, I found myself daydreaming about the one-bedroom apartment looking out onto Powderhorn Park. After waking up alone, I would brew some coffee, switch on one of my many ceiling fans, grab a robe from my largest cedar closet, and head for my breakfast nook.
“Nope,” he wrote back.
And suddenly I was back in the bigger place on the cheaper side of the park. My family was coming to join me. And I was glad.