Advice for the married, planning to get married, single but notavailable, single and available, no love life...
I have never met a man who didn't want to be loved. But I have seldom met a man who didn't fear marriage. Somethingabout the closure seems constricting, not enabling. Marriage seems easier to understand for what it cuts out of our livesthan for what it makes possible within our lives.
When I was younger this fear immobilized me. I did not want to make a mistake. I saw my friends get married for reasonsof social acceptability, or sexual fever, or just because they thought it was the logical thing to do.
Then I watched, as theyand their partners became embittered and petty in their dealings with each other. I looked at older couples and saw, atbest, mutual toleration of each other. I imagined a lifetime of loveless nights and bickering and could not imagine subjectingmyself or someone else to such a fate.And yet, on rare occasions, I would see old couples who somehow seemed to glow in each other's presence. Theyseemed really in love, not just dependent upon each other and tolerant of each other's foibles.
It was an astounding sight,and it seemed impossible. How, I asked myself, can they have survived so many years of sameness, so much irritationat the other's habits? What keeps love alive in them, when most of us seem unable to even stay together, much lesslove each other?The central secret seems to be in choosing well. There is something to the claim of fundamental compatibility. Goodpeople can create a bad relationship, even though they both dearly want the relationship to succeed. It is important to findsomeone with whom you can create a good relationship from the outset. Unfortunately, it is hard to see clearly in the earlystages.
Sexual hunger draws you to each other and colors the way you see yourselves together. It blinds you to the thousands oflittle things by which relationships eventually survive or fail. You need to find a way to see beyond this initial overwhelmingsexual fascination. Some people choose to involve themselves sexually and ride out the most heated period ofsexual attraction in order to see what is on the other side.
This can work, but it can also leave a trail of wounded hearts.Others deny the sexual side altogether in an attempt to get toknow each other apart from their sexuality. But they cannot see clearly, because the presence of unfulfilled sexual desirelooms so large that it keeps them from having any normal perception of what life would be like together.The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become long-time friends before they realize they are attracted to eachother. They get to know each other's laughs, passions, sadness, and fears. They see each other at their worst and attheir best. They share time together before they get swept into the entangling intimacy of their sexuality.
This is the ideal, but not often possible. If you fall under the spell of your sexual attraction immediately, you need to lookbeyond it for other keys to compatibility. One of these is laughter. Laughter tells you how much you will enjoy eachother's company over the long term.If your laughter together is good and healthy, and not at the expense of others, then you have a healthy relationship to theworld. Laughter is the child of surprise. If you can make each other laugh, you can always surprise each other. And if youcan always surprise each other, you can always keep the world around you new.
Beware of a relationship in which there is no laughter. Even the most intimate relationships based only on seriousnesshave a tendency to turn sour. Over time, sharing a common serious viewpoint on the world tends to turn you against thosewho do not share the same viewpoint, and your relationship can become based on being critical together.After laughter, look for a partner who deals with the world in a way you respect.
When two people first get together, theytend to see their relationship as existing only in the space between the two of them. They find each other endlesslyfascinating, and the overwhelming power of the emotions they are sharing obscures the outside world. As the relationshipages and grows, the outside world becomes important again. If your partner treats people or circumstances in a way youcan't accept, you will inevitably come to grief.
Look at the way she cares for others and deals with the daily affairs of life. Ifthat makes you love her more, your love will grow. If it does not, be careful. If you do not respect the way you each dealwith the world around you, eventually the two of you will not respect each other.Look also at how your partner confronts the mysteries of life. We live on the cusp of poetry and practicality, and the real lifeof the heart resides in the poetic.
If one of you is deeply affected by the mystery of the unseen in life and relationships,while the other is drawn only to the literal and the practical, you must take care that the distance doesn't become anunbridgeable gap that leaves you each feeling isolated and misunderstood.
There are many other keys, but you must find them by yourself. We all have unchangeable parts of our hearts that wewill not betray and private commitments to a vision of life that we will not deny. If you fall in love with someone who cannotnourish those inviolable parts of you, or if you cannot nourish them in her, you will find yourselves growing further apart untilyou live in separate worlds where you share the business of life, but never touch each other where the heart lives anddreams. From there it is only a small leap to the cataloging of petty hurts and daily failures that leaves so many couplesbitter and unsatisfied with their mates.So choose carefully and well.
If you do, you will have chosena partner with whom you can grow, and then the real miracleof marriage can take place in your hearts. I pick my words carefully when I speak of a miracle. But I think it is not toostrong a word. There is a miracle in marriage. It is called transformation. Transformation is one of the most commonevents of nature. The seed becomes the flower. The cocoon becomes the butterfly. Winter becomes spring and lovebecomes a child. We never question these, because we see them around us every day.
To us they are not miracles,though if we did not know them they would be impossible to believe.Marriage is a transformation we choose to make. Our love is planted like a seed, and in time it begins to flower. We cannotknow the flower that will blossom, but we can be sure that a bloom will come.If you have chosen carefully and wisely, the bloom will be good. If you have chosen poorly or for the wrong reason, thebloom will be flawed.
We are quite willing to accept the reality of negative transformation in a marriage. It was negativetransformation that always had me terrified of the bitter marriages that I feared when I was younger.It never occurred to me to question the dark miracle that transformed love into harshness and bitterness. Yet I wasunable to accept the possibility that the first heat of love could be transformed into something positive that was actuallydeeper and more meaningful than the heat of fresh passion. All I could believe in was the power of this passion and thefear that when it cooled I would be left with something lesser and bitter.
But there is positive transformation as well. Like negative transformation, it results from a slow accretion of little things.But instead of death by a thousand blows, it is growth by a thousand touches of love. Two histories intermingle. Twoseparate beings, two separate presence, two separate consciousnesses come together and share a view of life thatpasses before them. They remain separate, but they also become one. There is an expansion of awareness, not aclosure and a constriction, as I had once feared. This is not to say that there is not tension and there are not traps.
Tensionand traps are part of every choice of life, from celibate to monogamous to having multiple lovers. Each choice containswithin it the lingering doubt that the road not taken somehow more fruitful and exciting, and each becomes dulled to therichness that it alone contains.But only marriage allows life to deepen and expand and be leavened by the knowledge that two have chosen, against allodds, to become one. Those who live together without marriage can know the pleasure of shared company, but thereis a specific gravity in the marriage commitment that deepens that experience into something richer and more complex.
So do not fear marriage, just as you should not rush into it for the wrong reasons. It is an act of faith and it contains within itthe power of transformation. If you believe in your heart that you have found someone with whom you are able to grow, ifyou have sufficient faith that you can resist the endless attraction of the road not taken and the partner not chosen, ifyou have the strength of heart to embrace the cycles and seasons that your love will experience, then you may be readyto seek the miracle that marriage offers. If not, then wait. The easy grace of a marriage well made is worth your patience.When the time comes, a thousand flowers will bloom...endlessly. [sm1 send tis 2me, so let's share it]
