Love That Outlasts Marriage

If there is anything certain about the institution of marriage today, it is surely this: for the foreseeable future, marriages will continue to be based upon couples’informed consent, and their hope for emotional satisfactions beyond the power of life’s many challenges and crises finally to undermine. These are shaky foundations, to be sure. Awesomely shaky.

After all, just how “informed” can consent be between a man and a woman caught up in a seventh heaven of rapture over one another? And just how long will it take before earthly realities threaten to bring every couples’ soaring illusions to dust? There is only one really good answer to questions like these: if the foundations of modern marriages are swaying more than a little, those of traditional marriages are verging on collapse, e.g.: parental arrangement, dowries, sex devoted only to producing offspring, men as the only breadwinners, women as the only homemakers, and legally enforced indissoluability, not to mention the verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse to which “traditional” marriages have for too long turned a blind eye and a deaf ear.

But successful marriages constructed according to the free-choice, emotional intimacy model do not have to be as vulnerable as they are often made out to be. The most successful of them, at least in my observations, are so because their participants refuse to make emotional intimacy the be-all and the end-all of the relationship, and instead recognize that the greatest satisfactions that marriage has to offer come when and because other things are taken care of first. The most important of these other things is the fulfillment of commitment.

Expressed biblically, the kind of commitment I have in mind here is a couples’ mutual commitment to build each other up, unfailingly and truthfully, as a way of honoring God in the other. It is a commitment to build each other up as persons of sacred worth, created in God’s own image as bearers of a shared calling to love and work with the well-being of all God’s creatures uppermost in mind. It is a commitment to build each other up as parents entrusted with a sacred responsibility to nurture childrens’ --- their own and all others’ --- unique gifts and responsibility for contributing to humankind’s common destiny. And it is a commitment to build each other up as the finite, fallible, vulnerable creatures who deserve all the patient care and encouragement of which they and their equally imperfect and long-suffering partners are capable.

Long ago, Aristotle put the Western world on to something with his discovery that the universal desire for happiness is best satisfied by human beings’ learning to do well what is truly worth doing. The excellence of being (virtue) that results from doing worthy things well, the philosopher went on to teach, alone makes for true happiness. By-passing the attainment of virtue in the interest of quick fixes for fear, frustration, and loneliness may yield enticing pleasures of the moment, but in the end will only make people more miserable than ever. In Christian terms, the point is that for the attainment of the greatest happiness in intimate relationships, what is most needed is the mutual cultivation of the virtue of self-giving love.

We do not have to become completely virtuous in self-emptying before we earn the right to love and cherish a special someone for life. For while we are working on the one really big thing of becoming, in Aristotle’s sense of the word, “good” enough to deserve our partners, there are all kinds of things that we can do to make ourselves at least a little more tolerable to them for the moment. They are not little things; they take a good bit of “sweating.” If you don’t think so, reflect a little on whether it has been all that easy for you to be pleasant and negotiable 24/7, or on how it has been going keeping yourself reasonably fit and attractive, broadening your interests and developing further your natural aptitudes. And by the way, how are you doing with sharing more openly your concerns, hopes, and vulnerabilities with your partner, as you listen more attentively to his or hers?

Difficulties aside, all of these things are also worth doing and doing well, right down to making the bedroom an erogenous zone, and for those who find any one of them inordinately difficult, there is abundant help available, from across backyard fences, self-help books, therapists, schools, health clubs, trainers, coaches, and even from our churches. However, Aristotle never said that achieving virtue would be easy; he only said that the reward for doing so would be monumental. And Jesus never said that learning to love sacrifically would be easy either; he only said that it would be our most direct pathway to the kingdom of God.