Generally, I don’t really like to write publicly about the hard stuff, but let me open this by saying that this morning was hard. It’s been a busy week, and last night brought lightning and thunderstorms and hail and things blowing around the yard. Our daughter had trouble getting to sleep and then woke up at 12:30 and 2:30 before finally being up for the day around 5:30am. We were all dragging this morning, and my husband and I were not nice to each other—like silent breakfast, frustrated sighs, no kiss goodbye. That happens. Six and a half years into our marriage, I still don’t like it when we’re aggravated with each other, but I don’t panic about it like I used to in the early years; I know we’ll get over it. I remember thinking when I was first married about how high-stakes it felt. If you’re dating someone and you have a fight, you might think “Are we going to break up?” Whereas once you’re committed, you think “Are we going to have a bad marriage?” It took a little time for me to let go of that question, and that fear. At this point, I trust myself, my husband, and the relationship we’ve built enough to believe that we’re not going to have a bad marriage( as long as we keep communicating and working on it), even though there are times when it will feel bad, whether for an hour or a month.
I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage lately, about partnership, and about how my ideas of it have changed over the years. At our church this weekend, one of the prayers offered was for the parents of one of the congregants, who were about to celebrate their 69th(!) wedding anniversary. I’ve been married for nearly seven years myself, and have watched friends and family go through dating, marriage, affairs, breakdowns, divorces, living apart, getting back together, having a family, and all manner of other life changes. I don’t think about and understand marriage the same way that I used to at 19 when I had my first devastating break-up, or at 24 when I got married, or even at 28 when I got pregnant with my first child. And I’m sure I won’t think about it quite the same way in another few years, but for right now, I feel like I’ve got some sense of what I think about it at this point in my life.
I was thinking this morning about a conversation I had once, talking about a relationship that had ended, where I suggested that what it came down to is that I and this other person just wanted really different kinds of lives, and that was something that was just really difficult to overcome. The person I was talking with suggested that wanting a different life from someone else couldn’t be overcome if you didn’t love each other enough. I let it go, but even at the time I bristled a bit at that, and as I’ve thought about it over and over during the years since that discussion, I’ve realized that I really don’t agree with that explanation.
This is a little hard for me to say, because for much of my life I (rightly) defined myself as a romantic. I, too, believed that on some level whether a relationship worked or not came down—essentially—to whether two people “loved each other enough.” I don’t think that anymore. I think loving each other “enough” is only the minimum requirement, not a sufficient basis, for a lasting partnership. I’ve come to believe that what a partnership is, what commitment is, is something different; it is something that on the surface seems more depressingly practical, but at its heart is deeper and even more magical than “being in love.” At least in my world, wanting to, and being able to, make a life with someone is not necessarily the same thing as being in love with them.
I think culturally, we rail against this. We don’t like to think about the fact that the institution of marriage, for centuries, was a practical, economic and political arrangement, not a romantic one. It has taken me a long time to come to peace in myself about the idea that the practical, economic basis of marriage is still a reality, even as it is also a romantic and spiritual choice. In my experience, being married is challenging. There are times when we don’t like each other, times when we are disappointed with each other, times when it we don’t even want to be around each other. But, in the end, first of all we do love each other, and like each other. And, secondly, we’ve built a life in which we are mutually dependent on each other. Giving up the marriage would mean giving up the whole life we’ve put together as we know it. Our friends are all mutual friends. We’ve part of a closely connected community. We help out at and with each others work and projects. We have a schedule in which working, playing, and childcare are all shared. We have an old house and two cars and a yard and a woodstove that are all more than one person can happily maintain on her or his own. We need each other, at least in the sense that we’d each have to radically reinvent our life without the other person.
Finally, we’ve at the same time come to realize that we need other things in our lives besides each other. I admit that I entered into marriage with a naively “romantic” notion that a partner should or could fulfill all my emotional and social needs. It took me a while to realize that it was ok that my husband didn’t like to have long, late night conversations about feelings (I know, I know…:)), and that was fine. That was why I needed friends who liked to stay up late and play guitars and drink wine and talk about relationships. I needed my partner to support me to have those friendships, not take the place of them. And by the same token, it’s fine that I’m not into the intricacies of photographic chemistry as long as it’s ok with me to build a darkroom in our house, or for my husband to go to workshops by himself, or to stay late at work or take a Saturday morning away from me to take pictures on his own. We both need that stuff. At the same time, he’s gotten a lot better over the years at having conversations about feelings (and I’ve gotten better at backing off when it’s not the right time to have them), and I’ve learned a lot about photography and stopped rolling my eyes (mostly) when a box unexpectedly arrives at the house with a lens or yet another camera body in it. We’ve come to appreciate our differences, the spaces between each other. And we’ve come to admire what the other person has that we don’t, instead of feeling that the differences are a lack in either one of us. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it is an ongoing process, but we’ve come a long way, and are happier together and better, richer people individually, for it.
Granted, I am living and understanding this is a very particular personal context. Perhaps if you are economically and socially self-sufficient, this all doesn’t apply to you. And, obviously, there are plenty of situations where a couple might get to a point where reinventing their life is appealing, preferable, or necessary, or where for whatever reason staying in a partnership isn’t good for the individuals, or their family, and they’d be better off apart. But that’s a bit of a different question. I am thinking more about the situation in which the relationship is basically solid, but it’s hard. What keeps us together through that? I think it is wanting to make a life together, in addition to but distinctly apart from being attracted to and in love with each other.
And what makes that possible, and what I didn’t do a very good job with this morning, is keeping an active and faithful belief that we are each and both doing our best—even when it might not seem like it from the outside, or when we genuinely want more than the other person can give right now. That sounds simple, but for me it is a really, really powerful commitment that I have to work actively to keep. And part of keeping that is communicating—constantly, honestly. Being able to reflect, to ask for what we need; trying our genuine best to give the other person what they ask for, and also for them to accept it if we can’t give it right then. That’s the really wonderful, comforting part of our marriage being forever, that there’s time to work it through, to change and get better, that everything doesn’t need to happen right now or else. That we can both go to work angry and have time to cool off and come home and have a cup of tea together and try to figure it out and do better next time (and the time after that when it happens again, and the time after that). We keep working on it because we love each other…and also because I can’t re-wire the kitchen by myself.
