Marriage: An Essay

This is an actual essay on marriage. If you don't want to read an actual essay on marriage, feel free to skip it. I won't care. But it is insightful and perhaps funny. Well I think so...


Several weeks ago I listened to a speaker talking about planning and preparing for life. Her audience was mostly young women, teenagers, who are going to school and preparing for a life of what they see as excitement, adventure, and happily ever after. I suspect that many of those young girls have starry eyed plans filled with music, dancing, fame, fortune, and of course a handsome prince complete with a lovely carriage and castle.

The speaker related the story of a girl named Rebekah, who agreed to be married to a man from a far away land. It is a somewhat romantic tale found in the book of Genesis.

Of course, I being the realist that I am, found the tale more distressing than romantic. The speakers assertion that WHEN Isaac first laid his eyes on Rebekah he fell in love as she hopped lightly and nimbly off her camel, caused me to roll my eyes.

Love at first sight, not being my personal experience, seems a little bit of a shaky foundation to built a life together upon. I definitely hope that there are people who experience it and go onto a long, happy marriage, but I still find myself worried about starry eyed girls who believe that some how Rebekah and Isaac fell madly in love at first sight, married, and never had a care in the world again.

Because if you keep reading the story, you learn that despite the lovely jewelry that Rebekah received from her soon to be spouse, life wasn't all diamonds and caviar. The story doesn't go into the early years of the relationship, but there certainly were several of them, since it took twenty years for Rebekah to conceive. And even when she did, the twin boys she brought forth came out wrestling with each other. Their birth set the tone for their lives, lives that define the term sibling rivalry.

So even if Isaac and Rebekah fell in love at first sight, they had a long road of married life with difficult children ahead, something far different than the fanciful girlhood dreams that many young women entertain after spending their early years taking in the messages of Disney's princesses.

Now I love a good Disney movie. A young cartoon couple in love is a favorite story of mine, and while everyone of them have challenges leading up to their marriage, rarely do we see the challenges faced after the marriage. Tatiana is likely to spend more effort after her marriage taking care of that prince she saved as a frog in the bayou. Cinderella is leaving a completely disfunctional family for who knows what kind of relatives. Mulan will either be off fighting the forces of evil or home waiting for her manly husband to return from the battle. And that prince in Sleeping Beauty is going to have his hands full with a wife who is sweet and simple enough to wander the forest alone and play with pointy objects when she knows she has a problem and should stay away from them.

Last Saturday, I watched my oldest son dress up and head off for a prom date. Not more than an hour later, I attended a wedding reception for a couple married less than six hours. In both cases the couples were dressed up in beautiful clothes. Veritable princes and princesses. People standing on the thresehold of love and life and it got me thinking about marriage and this quote by David Howard Malone

"At the last few weddings we've attended, Vicki and I have looked at each other and smiled at the spectacle of two astonishingly young people making enthusiastic, mad, life-long promises to care for each other out of ignorance and hope and lust and, more often than not, conformity and greed and bravado and an unrealistically optimistic view of their own capacity for unselfishness. What these people are promising each other is outlandish and courageous and intensely beautiful." (Catapult Magazine, The Metamorphosis, Vol 4, No. 15, July 2005)

Each newly married couple thinks that they are hopping on a beautiful carousel ride of bliss and joy with the most perfect person imaginable, or at least close enough to perfect with only a few simple modifications needed. Each is sure they can live with the small imperfections of their spouse. Or they will change them. No big deal. We are together. We are happy. We are in love and lust. Our passion will overcome all. And besides the mount (marriage) is so lovely, ribbon bedecked and all.

Little do we know the dream companion is not nearly as maleable as we thought. In Malone's words:

"Only after we're married do we discover that our new spouse is an alien landscape, with perceptions and expectations that are nothing like ours. We go into marriage thinking our differences are superficial, that underneath the quirky facade our beloved is just like us, but what we find is that these differences can't be discarded like clothing: the quirk goes to the bone."

And not only is our beloved not exactly what we thought, our trusty mount isn't either. Within only a little while we discover that the beautiful and calm up and down of the carousel is instead rather bumpy on a good day and an awful lot like a bucking bronco who is looking to throw you and stomp on your head on the bad ones.

So what is that naive and rather bruised couple to do? Well pick themselves up and help the other get back on for one.

Marriage is quite simply hard. Despite our intital beliefs, we are not compatible in every way and we probably won't ever change the other's "problems", but we can change ourselves. And we can be kind. We can sacrifice and work and lift each other. And on the really bad days instead of kicking each other in the teeth after being thrown by the marriage horse, we can pull each other up and limp after it and maybe even spend a little time talking, remembering the good days and building some more better days, while eating the dang horse's dust.

The early days of adoration fade, but for those willing to endure together, they can be replaced with companionship and concern,deep trust  and self sacrifice, and well -- love.