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.

Marriage’s Lost Golden Age

Here is an intriguing statement about marriage from Stephanie Coontz’ new book, Marriage: A History: “It took more than 150 years to establish the love-based, male-breadwinner marriage as the dominant model in North America and Western Europe. It took less than 25 years to dismantle it.” My own pastoral work as a marriage counselor spanned just these latter 25 years, years fraught with anxiety, frustration, and confusion both for me and for a lot of my couples. From personal experience, then, I resonate to a lot of what Coontz is getting at not only in her statement itself, but in the book which lays out everything else that the statement implies.

Across those 25 years, almost before our very eyes, my counselees and I watched with mild horror (a) the dissolution of marriage as, in Coontz’ description, “the master event” of peoples’ lives, (b) the overturning by both women and men of sex-only-in-marriage as the ideal, (c) one failed research effort after another on reversing a soaring divorce rate, and finally, (d) the discovery that without a lot of support from family, friends, and faith communities, being a single parent sucks. What got to me most in the counseling I did during those years --- besides trying to find enough hours in the week for more and more troubled couples --- was the extent of the guilt that people felt over not keeping their marriages going the way they were “supposed” to go. Clinging with a ferocious nostalgia to the love-based, male-breadwinner, always-happy-children model only made their guilt feelings worse.

For some, divorce did relieve things a little. As one divorcee put it, sadly: “I guess there are a lot of people out there like me whose first time around will turn out to be just for practice.” But many of my former couples still have not moved on to anything like a better life. They cannot find that just-right person for the next time around. Or they thought they had, but their new partner turned out to be just as boring and neglectful as the last one was. Or they wound up with just more abuse. And through it all, their children have had to trade in most of their illusions about parental nurture for the harsh realities of street-learned resilience.

The really tragic thing about all this is that the very model that has contributed most to the instabilities in marriage today also contains just that understanding from which strong marriages not only can be but are still being built. If what we are really looking for most in relationships, whatever our other political and social agendas for them may be, is getting emotional needs met, then marriage is still one of our very best bets for making it happen. As one widely read writer, Mel Krantzler, kept harping at us, we have our best chance for happiness with the very partner that we may think we ought to get rid of.

There is a good bit of evidence to support Krantzler’s rants. For one thing, most reliable studies still show that the split-up rate of second marriages is higher than for first ones, and that it goes even higher for thirds. (Good studies on fourth marriages and above have nor appeared as yet.) Live-in relationships before marriage are not any more successful; most of the ones I know that made a go of it were the ones whose participants eventually followed my invitation to head to the court house for a license and then meet me at the altar.

We need to be clear that not all marriages either can or should be saved. As the title of his most widely read book, Creative Divorce, should make plain, Mel Krantzler knew this well. But what we need to appreciate is that more marriages are salvageable than the current divorce rate would indicate, within and not beyond the “emotional intimacy” model of the ideal marriage relationship. Another book that has been around a while but is still worth reading, this one by therapist Michelle Weiner Davis, shows this with considerable insight. Apropos its major convictions, the book carries the title, Divorce Busting.

I am going to try to put up, rather than shut up, about this perspective in the next column. Yes, yes --- I know. I promised earlier that this Junetide, my thoughts on marriage would span just three columns. Perhaps you will be willing to chalk up my need for a fourth to an unwillingness to stay as pessimistic about the prospects for emotionally intimate marriages as Stephanie Coontz sometimes sounds. Deal?