A Kind Of Closeness Not To Worry About

The cold drizzle that enveloped all of us during the burial service abated somewhat, and two brothers hung back to reminisce a little more about their father before turning to the many friends of the family who were maintaining their distance respectfully. Silently praying for the last time over the casket, I could not help overhearing the brothers’ speaking gently and lovingly, but also regretfully, about their parents. “I don’t know what Mom’s going to do now,” one said, “ it’s like he’s been torn right out of her.” His brother responded: “Their marriage was a terminal case of the same-old-same-old, and it died a long time ago.”

I never got a chance to talk to my parishioner’s sons about their brief interchange that day; they left for the airport before I could get to them, and I did not see them again before leaving the church the next year for a new pastoral appointment. But I have thought about them every time I bring to mind the parents of whom they spoke. Millie and Sam (not their real names) had the longest surviving marriage in the congregation at the time, and I still have a vivid memory of manning the punch bowl at their 62nd anniversary, and of being startled by two things they said to me that day. “It still scares me how much alike we are, preacher,” Sam said, “sometimes it’s so boring around her I almost go crazy.” Millie’s comment echoed Sam’s uncannily: “I’m ashamed to admit this, but Sam has never done anything different about anything in his life, and there are times when I think I’m just gonna kill him!” It helped that during each broadside, Sam and Millie were smilingly holding out their punch cups for a refill.

I was privileged to serve Millie and Sam’s small rural church long enough to learn a good bit about its views and values on a lot of things, and particularly on the subject of “suitable” marriage partners. For this community the ideal couple was a compatible couple, and the compatible couple was a couple alike in upbringing, economic status, interests, and temperament. Perhaps most importantly of all, compatibility was predicated on the mutual expectation that personal interests as a couple, save perhaps for brief interludes behind locked bedroom doors, would be subordinated to the interests and needs of their own children and their respective extended families.

In relationships like Millie’s and Sam’s, questions that haunt couples so impressively today seem only rarely to be thought of at all, e.g.: How can we continue to grow as individuals and still be a couple?; How can we make times just for ourselves, away from bosses, kids, in-laws, neighbors, and friends, and still be a family?; How can we get more and more pleasure out of more and better sex with our spouse, without greater familiarity breeding even more contempt? I came to know Millie and Sam well enough to know that while they were not utterly ignorant about questions like these, they did not take them seriously enough to think they were worth working out answers to in their own marriage. Compatibility and commitment were supposed to be enough. And for them, they were. What this couple thought every marriage should be about they also strongly believed had survived in their own. What their sons thought marriage should be about they may have strongly believed either had never been a part of or had long since died in their parents‘.

Most couples’ counselors I know tell me that they have more experience dealing with problems in opposites-attract relationships than they do in like-meets-like ones. And more than a few admit that when they do meet up with the latter kind of couple, their instinct is to try to find ways to help each member tap into the opposite side of his and her respective nature, in the hopes of spicing things up a bit. This seems to me a matter of torquing clients in the direction of the therapist’s own comfort level more than it is a matter of meeting clients on their own ground. If the strategy works, of course, there will be even more opportunities for clients to continue working on their relationships, this time for the sake of correcting the problems that oppositeness rather than sameness tends to create.

What Millie and Sam still get me to thinking about is the patience and good humor that can make a marriage work when the marriage itself is not the be-all and end-all of a couple’s coupling. I did not see their own relationship the way that one of their sons appeared to have seen it. It never would have died of boredom. But it just might have been killed from tinkering.