Today is June 23, the 42nd anniversary of the day I made the biggest mistake of my life, getting married only 6 weeks out of college. The intervening years have amplified how big a mistake that was and how much better it would have been if I had spent my 20’s (or longer) in hedonistic singleness.
What prompted me to think about that was a Facebook post by a classmate of mine, about the beauty of sticking it out in marriage. It’s a well written bit of prose, and the writer has written several books on the experience of being of student at The Citadel during the late 70’s and early 80’s. (Information how to buy his books – which are well worth your time to read – can be found at the end of this post.)
Let’s look at what he wrote:
So what happens when you get married? You take somebody that’s as flawed and imperfect as you are and you chain yourself to them. And you say, “No matter what happens, we aren’t running away.” Because if you can run away, you won’t be forced to work through the muck and mire and garbage that all marriages contain. And don’t let anybody tell you that marriage means happily ever after. That’s a lie.So we bet the farm that each of us is going to make the other one happy … which of course is a losing bet. And for the next four or five decades, we can keep our mouths shut and suffer in those chains, or we can look each other in the eye and work through our differences.
You might think that being chained to each other like that is stupid. And it actually is. But the alternative? Having an escape hatch? Running from one partner to the next? To the next? To the next? You’ll never learn life’s lessons. You’ll just keep running away and remain adult children for the rest of your lives.
And what happens when you stick with each other like that? After all of the confrontations and the tears and the yelling and the healing? After that? Two people who were completely flawed and imperfect find that they’ve conquered those flaws and imperfections and in the process, they’ve become something completely different than what they were when they began so many years earlier. Simply because they chained themselves together with a vow that, come what may, they’ll never run. And two flawed and imperfect people end up being the best marriage partners of all.
Ever since I read that bit of excellent writing I have been thinking about it. It’s a wonderful tribute to the virtues of “sticking it out” in a marriage relationship. It’s an excellent tribute to those marriages that stay healthy and exciting over the stretch of a lifetime.
And you may ask yourself, who could argue with any of it?
I submit to you that his beautiful tribute represents, at most, 25% of all the marriages in the United States and, for that matter, in the world. The rest of us endure a much different and painful experience – regardless of whether you choose to stick it out or not. The majority of marriages are a power struggle where one person – or perhaps each person – seeks to dominate the other partner at a particular point in time. Sometimes it becomes effective enough that it smothers the weaker partner’s will to continue and exist.
For about 5900 years of the existence of modern civilization(s), marriage has been mostly about economics and power. It’s only in the last 140 years or so that the idea of “love marriage” arose, and even then, it was a convenient fiction designed to cover up the cruel economic underpinning behind the concept of being “chained together.” A contractual arrangement that ensured the advancement and continued existence of the respective partners and their families.
For at least 50% of Americans, the weight of those chains can actually threaten to kill you, and so – many people make the hard decision that divorce is the better option. It becomes not an escape hatch – but a choice to save one’s life while you still can.
But divorce is not easy in America. And it’s cruelly expensive. A recent article in The Atlantic pointed out:
The convoluted process of divorce still carries a whiff of paternalism, a suggestion that the state doesn’t trust people to make responsible decisions. “It’s this deep-seated state commitment to keeping people married and discouraging divorce,” says Laurie Kohn, a law professor at George Washington University and the director of its Family Justice Litigation Clinic. Some people will, indeed, give up and stay married. “Often, those are the clients that I see 20 years after they have stopped living with and having a relationship with their spouse, and they want to get remarried,” she told me.
Concepts such as community property, and laws like the abomination that is the USFSPA (which I have written about extensively) coupled with outmoded concepts like alimony – and the very real and painful discussions about child support and custody – make dissolving a marriage an ordeal. Only really rich people can afford to get divorced multiple times.
Divorce gets even more complicated when children, shared debts, or lots of money come into play. John Whitfield, the executive director of Blue Ridge Legal Services in Virginia, says the legal-aid firm stopped representing clients in child-custody disputes, because “they just soaked up all of our resources.” Some people find themselves squaring off against their ex and their ex’s lawyer by themselves, and the judge doesn’t treat the two sides any differently. Their ex’s lawyer can request documents: bank statements, bills, and other evidence that can draw out the proceedings. “When you see someone walk into the courtroom without a lawyer,” Whitfield says, “they’re gonna lose. The court system rolls its eyes at those people.”
None of which addresses the emotional cost and additional penalty paid – that of lost time – when you could and should be restoring yourself to happiness. Ask anyone who has been through the living hell of a sexless marriage watching your “biological clock” tick down.
Time stops for no one, and the “window of opportunity” where you can have a vibrant romantic and sexually charged relationship is limited. Unfortunately, for many of us, the combination of the financial and emotional penalties that divorce brings makes us postpone the decision because fear of the unknown overcomes the desire to strike out on one’s own. From my point of hindsight, I now realize that I should have jumped ship a lot sooner than I did, and as I have told others, “if you think it’s time to go, it probably is, and you will pay a high price for waiting.”.
Look, I get the desire to make a love a “success.” However, the definition of success is drastically different from one individual to another. Also, people become different over time. The traits that might have made a person attractive at one point may become uncomfortably annoying later on down the line. Most of the time, myself included, people decide to get married when they are young, and they lack sufficient life experience to form an intelligent analysis.
I also take serious issues with the idea of “soulmates.” The idea that there is one and only one special person for each of us is simply crazy. “Comfortable roommates” – perhaps. “Soulmates”? Never. From my own experience, I can attest that I have aged; I can fully understand the concept of having multiple relationships with various folks – all of which can be satisfying for the particular needs of the persons involved.
I take issue with the idea that “if you run away,” you will “never learn life’s lessons.” For myself and many others, “running away’ forced me to confront those life lessons and make hard choices for myself. It forced me to make choices and decide to put my happiness first. It’s a gift I have treasured ever since. When you stop living someone else’s vision of what they think your life has to be and take ownership of your life – it’s an emotionally liberating experience. I shudder every time I think that I might not have learned and experienced that.
Part of the beauty of the current time we live in is that we have both the technology and the social structure to remake the idea of marriage and family for probably the first time in human history. Women have fought their way out of being “men’s property” in marriage. They have earned and want the ability to define their lives on their terms. They should, too. And so should men. The “nuclear family” was a mistake in the light of hindsight. As much as it pains me to quote David Brooks, he’s right when he says,” the family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half-century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.”
The problem with Brook’s premise is that no one, not even the Kibbutzim in early Israel, has found an alternative to raising children. I certainly don’t have an alternative way to do it – although I can think that “blended families” and or a better term, “ collective associations of partners” could probably come the closest to an alternative.
No one should sacrifice their own well-being because of that obligation is the only point I am trying to make. And I truly think that marriage as an institution is outmoded. Certainly, the traditional American view of marriage is something we can dispense with and move on from.
When I lived in Europe, I met many couples who referred to their living companion as their “partner.” Some were actually married, some were not. It all seemed to work quite fine, children went to school, went to work, and German society was not falling apart. Maybe we Americans could take a lesson from that.
So what’s the point here, Skippy? We know you are not a fan of marriage and think it is a useless institution. Why ruin it for someone else?
That’s a good point, and my response is, I am not. I just think there are different types of people – not all of them are suited to a marital straight jacket. There’s plenty of examples of flawed and imperfect people who kill each other too. So maybe our society should become broad enough to enable folks to pursue a different path to love and self-fulfillment.
After all, there are many different women and men in the world. As the title says, your mileage may vary.
Be sure to buy my classmate’s books! Details here.