On Marriage: My Two Cents

“How often are you happy, Charlotte?”

Carrie and Miranda, heartbroken and disillusioned by their too-fallibly human men, ask this question of their other married friend in the Sex and the City movie.

“Every day,” she answers, almost guiltily, as if she has no right to her happiness in the face of her friends’ difficulties. “Not all the time every day,” she hastily amends, “but—every day.”

How important is your happiness anyway?

So first there was one Seth Adam Smith's blog that went viral. Then there was this rebuttal (one of several). Then there was Very Angry Anti-Liberal Guy's rebuttal to the rebuttal (one of several). My friend Angie even wrote her own thoughtful take, and now I’m writing mine. The topic of the week, evidently, is marriage; and not just marriage, but conclusively deciding what marriage is and who it is for. And we are all up in arms.

But can we put down our guns for a minute? It seems like everyone wants to get the last word, to lay the smack down. Write THE “that’s what marriage is all about, Charlie Brown” blog. I admit, my egotistical impulse as I considered writing this was to do the same. But I will resist that desire because the more I think about it, the more I realize nobody has the last word on marriage.

There are as many kinds of marriages and partnerships as there are people, and we can only see other people’s marriages through the glass of our own picture windows. There is value in listening to (or reading) experiences completely unlike our own. Sure, we react to other people’s reflections on marriage based on those windows, and we react strongly. But maybe we should try to step back, and realize that others’ journeys are not about us. I know that’s what I had to do after reading Seth’s blog. Just because I got involved in a marriage that was a disaster precisely because I completely discounted my own importance does not invalidate this man's experience and journey. 

I may still strongly disagree with the way he expressed some things, because I find them personally hurtful and can see he doesn't have the experience to validate his words, but his story is not mine, it is his own. As are all of ours.

I know I’ve looked at some of my friends’ marriages from my little window, completely aghast at what seems to be their reality; yet they profess absolute contentment. I know that I could never live with their kind of marriage, but I’ve come to realize how little that matters. I am not them, and they are not me.

On the flip side, I’ve been blindsided by news of a breakup or secret trouble between two people I’d thought were “perfect for each other”. Which shows what I know; and that’s not much.

Whether you’ve been together a month, a lifetime, or somewhere in between, there is one constant: marriage, just like life, is always an uncertainty.

We don’t even know the full truth about our own marriages. There was a time in his former marriage when my now husband routinely claimed (and fully believed) that nobody had a better, stronger marriage than him. 

And I remember telling people the story of how I got together with my first husband, and how romantic they all thought it was. “When you know, you know,” I would tell them knowingly, truly believing I knew. 

I also remember years ago overhearing a friend of mine (who ultimately went through a divorce) having a heart-to-heart with another married friend of hers, both agreeing that divorce was “simply not an option” for either of them.

When we’re in the midst of something, we just can’t see the full truth. Try to paint a landscape while you’re standing in the middle of it.

I think probably that even if you do stay happily together for decades, only perspective gives you the gift of fully understanding, just like anything else in life, the various ups and downs in your marriage.

So if you are married or in a long-term committed relationship, you know that as my friend Myriam says (or her mom says. Or her mom’s mom says?): every marriage is a black box. Every married/committed person (I think) has many moments with their spouse where they look at each other and say “Can you even imagine what our (friends/parents/siblings/whoever) would say if they could see/hear this right now?” and burst out laughing. Then there are the not so funny bits that nobody knows or would ever guess, as well.

Marriage is full of quirks and shadowy corners, secret gears and scotch-tape, worn mechanisms that keep it ticking, for better or for worse. Nobody can fully see inside that box except the two people who built it. And when it breaks, they are the only ones who will ever be capable of fully understanding why, and even then they may opt out of thinking about it enough to arrive at that point.

So if you haven’t been through a divorce, but you have watched from the sidelines, picking teams and deciding who’s a victim and who’s the “Wal-Mart philosophy” villain—well, I don’t expect to change your mind. Judgers gonna judge.

But to look at someone else’s divorce and decree with smug disgust that this or that partner was “selfish” and just looking for someone who makes them transiently “happy” –that is the epitome of injustice.

Sure, people make mistakes, go about doing the right thing the wrong way, communicate poorly, behave immaturely and irrationally. Sometimes when a relationship goes awry, these things are very evident. But having lived through plenty of divorce in my family life, I know that in the vast majority of cases divorce is heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, mega-painful, serious business. Years of therapy, tears, self-examination, and/or deliberation often ensue beforehand. (Maybe there are people who get divorced because of very simplistic reasons; I just don’t know any of them personally.)

So next time you are tempted, like Really Angry Guy, to dismiss 50% of the population as selfish and looking for instant gratification, please think again. I also intensely resent the implication that I did not “choose wisely” because I am divorced. I chose as wisely as I could with the experience and resources available to me at that point in my life. Before deciding about other people’s marriages, consider the reality that you do not and never will have all the pieces of the puzzle.

Nor is the puzzle any of your business, really. Mind your own marriage. Mind your own life. Life is a school, and God (or the Universe, if you prefer) deliberately gave you control over only one student: yourself.

Which brings me to my thoughts on serving others while caring for oneself.

Ironically, it seems the crowd that thinks they are so important as to have the power to make judgments about the marriages and divorces of those around them are the same ones crowing about how great it is that they have made themselves completely unimportant in the scheme of their own family lives. Bewildering, no?

Here’s the truth as I see it from my own picture window: caring for each other is important. Learning to give up your selfish behavior and patterns, your childish emotional reactions, and desires to achieve your own goals before all else is part and parcel of the marriage deal.

But if you aren’t being honest with yourself about what you need (which is different from what you want, as we all teach our toddlers), if you aren’t constantly on a journey to increase your self-understanding—you aren’t going to be able to truly give anyone else what they need. You aren’t going to be able to truly understand someone else the way we all yearn to be understood.

Those of us who protested the original blog post were not trying to attack poor Seth; we were simply pointing out the uncomfortable reality that unsurprisingly, many deny: the hardest work you have to do in life is dealing with your own self, as you are.

As I was pondering people’s incredibly defensive reactions to the current crop of blogs on this topic, Matt and I asked each other: Do you feel like you have to sacrifice a lot for me? Do you feel like our marriage is really hard? Do you feel like this marriage is not about you?

At first I said no, I really don’t. I feel like I sacrifice nothing. I feel like my marriage is a joy and a blessing. Hearing Matt’s voice when I don’t expect it still makes my heart jump into my throat. Sometimes I watch him sleep and cry from the sheer force of how much I love him.

Frankly, it made me a little worried. Was it bad, I asked him, that I felt that way? Did it mean I was doing something wrong?

But then he pointed out to me how ironic my answers were:

Did I not subject myself to an incredible amount of judgment, much of it extremely harsh and from people I cared about very much, to be with him?

Did I not leave my family, friends, and the children who occupy a very large place in my heart in California in order to be an eternally foreign northerner in Mississippi?

Did I not willingly give up the joy of being the first woman to make my beloved a father? Did I not know that I may never be able to equal that gift, and that living with that reality may break my heart a little bit every day?

And do I not willingly sacrifice half of our “carefree newlywed” life to do the emotionally taxing work of navigating my step-parenting role with his son?

Do I not give up little luxuries, on a daily basis, for the sake of an innocent child though I had no part in bringing him into this world?

Do we not have tense and sometimes painful discussions about finances, family, where to spend holidays?

Do we not fight sometimes?

Do we not have ongoing points of unresolved tension that rear their ugly heads when they are the least welcome?

Of course I did, I do, and we do.

I guess it just comes down to perspective. So I feel like the challenges of this marriage are nothing, are pure joy. I’m not trying to make myself sound super-awesome in comparison to everybody else; I’m trying to make it clear that what I have is pure gold--in comparison to what I had before: a bogged down, miserable existence of trying to be the oxygen for a man, my best friend, who didn’t know how to breathe on his own. Believing I could, and should, be that loving sustenance. Sure, I felt stuck, depressed, sad, lonely, frustrated, overwhelmed. But hey, it wasn’t about me, right? I had married him in front of God and those witnesses, and it was my responsibility to make it work. To force it to work. To find the way.

Had I read Seth’s blog at that point in my life, I very easily could have taken it dangerously to heart. I might have remembered my own trepidation before my own wedding, and found comfort in his father’s advice: it didn’t matter that I was uncertain about the marriage, because it wasn’t about me. Our families and friends wanted us together, he was great with kids, he wanted me with him, and that, apparently, should suffice.

But the reality was I did my ex-husband no favors by making it all about him. The work he needed to do the most, he could never do with me by his side. The work I needed to do could not be done with him in my life, either. (I would elaborate for clarity, but I respect him too much to do so.) We tearfully recognized this two years ago today and hugged each other goodbye. After signing divorce papers 6 months later we hugged again, briefly paying homage to the good parts of our marriage. He’s a good man and I wish nothing but good things for him, and I hope he wishes the same for me.

So don’t tell me I have a “Wal-Mart philosophy” and “gave up when I decided I wanted a new one”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sometimes something is so broken, it truly can’t be fixed, no matter what you do. But as the saying goes, you live, you learn. That marriage wasn’t a failure, because it taught me the most important lessons I’ve learned in my life to date.

When I first saw the Sex and the City movie, it was at a very difficult point in that first marriage. I look back and see it as the beginning of the end—a process that took three agonizing years.

When I heard Charlotte’s words, in that scene I quoted above, I immediately felt an empty hollowness in my chest. Was it really supposed to be like that? I wondered. Could you really be in a marriage with so much love that it brought you joy every day? I resented the implication.

Happiness, I thought, was ephemeral. Nice when it came along, but never lasting more than a day, maximum, at a time. Feeling “happiness” was not what life was meant to be about. (I still believe that, by the way.)

Now I can see that I confused that happy emotion with a happy state of being, which I never had in that marriage—why? Because it was never about me. And that crushed my soul.

We do matter in our own marriages. Yes, we do deserve some things as (I believe) children of God created to love and be loved. We all deserve to be with someone we love, someone we want to be married to and/or spend our lives with, someone who helps us grow rather than holds us back; whatever that looks like for each one of us. Almost everyone I know who ended up divorced got married too young, before they knew who they really were and what they needed, myself included. So I’ll say this: what we do NOT deserve is to punish ourselves for a lifetime because we made the wrong decision for forever when we were 23.

If, like I did, we make the mistake of ignoring our Selves, that is the worst disservice to those we claim to love.

Even on days like yesterday, when my stepson wet the bed and is in a tantrum-ish mood, the cat peed on the floor, the other cat might have worms, the laundry isn’t doing itself, obligations continue to be unfulfilled, the house is an unmitigated disaster, I have PMS (which means, obviously, I am again Not Pregnant, Queen of the One-Line Test), fear and stress over money and work hours demands instant attention, I keep spilling everything from my soup to the contents of my purse, and crying over nothing—even on these days when I feel anything but happy, I am happy.

I am happy because when I ask my husband to come back from dropping off his son to help me with dinner (a trial run for our Thanksgiving food, due on his parents’ table where I promised it at six, the complexity of which was overwhelming me in my hellishly hot kitchen) and he says he can’t because he has to go back to work, and I’m so frustrated I’m about to cry (again) he stops walking out the door, turns around, and wraps his arms around me tight. I turn to kiss him and am thankful that in the midst of the chaos, this is my life now. I did this. I brought this to myself by loving my ex-husband in the way he needed to be loved, hard as it was, and by letting myself understand that I matter.

I have this man who is in love with me, who I am in love with, no matter what. It fills my heart to bursting, even if I do have to chop my own garlic while the onions burn and he has to go back to work so he can provide for all of us as best he can, which we both know still won’t be enough to make ends meet.

“Thank you,” I whisper to him. “Thank you for never making marriage feel like work. Even when it is.”

And he kisses me again (and I almost stab him forgetting there’s a knife in my hand) and now I know that’s the kind of happy Charlotte was talking about all along.

But this isn’t the last word. I know very well that my experience and my life is NOT the be-all end-all, and I am not the pinnacle of wisdom and brilliance. But I’m appreciating this conversation and learning much of value from it. I look forward to reading more contributions and hope it continues for awhile.

Thank you for caring enough to read what I have to say.

(Oh, also, this quote, because it’s simple and true. “Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational." ~Hugh Mackay)