Love & Marriage

By the time this newsletter arrives in your inbox, Liz and I will have been married for 10 years, since October 16, 2010. That's not a particularly long time (though it is longer than the average length of an American marriage) but it is worth celebrating. Being high school sweethearts, Liz and I had a fairly long courtship (too long, according to my mother-in-law) and we both have been with each other for more than 50% of our lives. If our relationship were a person, it would be eligible to vote (and here is a reminder, as if you needed one, to please vote).

Weddings are wonderful things, they are about promise, opportunity and, if there's time, love. They are also documents of culture. The tradition of the bride and groom not seeing each other before the wedding is a holdover from a time of arranged marriages when it behooved a family from keeping the appearance of their daughter secret lest the suitor want to back out (this is also where the idea of the wedding veil comes from). I recall a wedding in an open venue in which the bridesmaids had to go to extreme (and extremely funny) lengths to shield the bride from the groom with a bed sheet. A Belarusian bride traditionally walks to the church dragging a towel, so important is that piece of fabric to that country. When the actors who voiced Popeye and Olive Oyl were married, they served spinach. At the Queen Mother's nuptials in 1923 her wedding cake weighted a half a ton. Ours wasn't quite that big but it was, like just about everything else that day, lovely. Liz looked incredible, our best friends were all there and we danced like never before. Many readers of this newsletter set personal records in terms of alcohol consumption. The reception took place at a country club and a friend of mine spend the evening on the 18th green, only to be awoken by the first foursome of the morning, asking him to get out of their lie.

If was, however, not the best day of my life. Don't get me wrong, it was a truly great day, but I'm not sure I want to commit to a day that doesn't include my children or the countless dear friends we have made since then. One of the more pernicious untruths, promoted by an out-of-control wedding industry that has monstrously grown even since we were wed, is that a wedding is the culmination of something, that it is a grand achievement in and of itself. A wedding, if it is anything at all, is the beginning of something and while it is nice to have people cheering at the beginning of a marathon, it doesn't mean the runners will cross the finish line. The work is just about to begin. Nothing exposes this lie more than the fact that there is an inverse relationship between the cost of a wedding and the length of a marriage. Couples that spend less than $1000 on on their nuptials get divorced 53% less than the national average. A wedding that costs $20,000 or more presents the couple with a divorce rate 46% above average. The cruel irony is that there is also a correlation between lots of wedding guests and a long marriage. A guest list of more than 200 makes you nearly 100% less likely to get divorced than a wedding with just a few guests. So, to the frustration of brides everywhere, the key is to have a cheap wedding with lots of guests.

Of course, this all assumes that a wedding is necessary in the first place. Obviously, people have been more than happy without one. For many, the institution is an archaic relic of a more paternalistic age, one in which wives became trapped property. It was only in 1857 when a British man lost the legal right to sell his wife, after all. And it's true that marriage too often becomes a home of hypocrisy underlined by the fact that one-third of men using dating sites are already married. George Eliot, who knew how to write a bad marriage, had this to say in her magisterial first novel Adam Bede: "What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?" Isn't all of that possible without a dinner of dry chicken and uncomfortable dollar dances? Don't forget the Spanish word for wives, esposas, also means "handcuffs." "...married life is merely a habit," wrote Oscar Wilde. "A bad habit." Perhaps they're right, but it has proven to be a hard habit for the humanity to break. Agatha Christie was so pleased to be wed, she listed her profession as "married woman" whenever she filled out forms. The French are so committed to the institution (in principle, at least, 43% of married French people cheat), that it is legal there to marry a dead person provided you can prove a wedding was already planned. Maybe they're just committed to honoring deposits.

No matter what social or cultural obstacles are thrown in its way, matrimony continues unabated. Rachmaninoff, Darwin, Einstein and Edgar Allen Poe were all married to their first cousins. Ptolemy VII of ancient Egypt managed to marry both his sister and his sister-in-law at once as his bride was his brother's widow. 90% of the world's teenage mothers aged 16 to 19, which brings to mind a barefoot reprobate with a father long out of the picture, are married. Brigham Young had 55 wives. Genghis Khan, of whom 1 out of 10 central Asians are direct descendants, had 500. One is enough for me, and sometimes, even that proves too much.

None of this proves that marriage is necessary for a happy relationship (in fact, some of those examples, may be arguments against it). Because it isn't. I have my own reasons for the imperative of this band of gold on my left hand but they are highly personal and hardly anything I would consider universal. Love can't be enhanced by a ceremony or a notarized piece of paper, it gets its energy from the people who engage in it and their status is up to them, beholden to no law or spiritual edict. We get so wrapped up in what we are supposed to do when the only thing we owe ourselves is happiness, whatever that may look like. Of course, love is about selflessly widening that debt, making it so that you owe happiness to at least one other person, with the understanding that they owe it to you. In ten years, that arrangement between Liz and I has fallen out of balance from time to time but we've always been committed to putting it right, all of which would have been true if we were married or not.

We're lucky. For many others, through no fault of their own, the scales can't be balanced no matter how hard they work. I hate the phrase that a relationship "fails," because it encourages a lie that every relationship is bound to succeed. The scary thing about love is that you enter into an arrangement, and put your emotional well-being in someone else's hands, with no guarantees that it will work out. I know what the aforementioned Oscar Wilde, always cryptic and contradictory, meant when he wrote “The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.” The merging of two different lives is one of the most foolish undertakings humans can attempt, especially when young. We are not the people who exchanged vows ten years ago and it's nothing short of a miracle that the changes we've both gone through have been compatible. We've got no guarantees that the changes that lie ahead will be.

But we have each other. We have memories and inside jokes and powerful wells of strength that you only develop when you've trusted someone else for a long time. We have a few unresolved issues, a number of lines we don't cross and, yes, needs that the other can't fulfill. I don't think either of us ever wanted to be everything to each other as long as we are something that can't be defined, can't be quantified but definitely can't be replaced. After all this time, my wife remains a mystery to me, one that I want to spend the rest of my life trying (and failing) to figure out. St. Thomas Aquinas, whose writing on love went unsurpassed for its eloquence and wisdom until Schopenhauer, declared that "a thing is loved more than it is known; since it can be loved perfectly, even without being perfectly known." Thank goodness for that. The Spanish word for wives may mean handcuffs but I spend more time thinking how the word "widow" comes from the Latin for "empty," which is not only how I would be if I lost Liz for good, it's how I am if she takes a little too long at the store. We are tuning forks. We are linked. And, going on ten years at least, we are very lucky.